Totally Under Control

Though produced in just five months during the restrictions of a global pandemic, Totally Under Control is a patient, pointed, but non-inflammatory work of cinematic journalism. The prolific documentarian Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), in a fruitful collaboration with co-directors Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, delivers a clear, detailed, chronologically-structured account of America’s tragic mishandling of the COVID-19 outbreak. I say America’s mishandling rather than the Trump administration’s, not because this film shies away from placing blame for our country’s chaotic response and high death count squarely where it belongs—at the desk of our Commander-In-Chief—but because Totally Under Control is far more than a hastily assembled piece of anti-Trump propaganda. The film provides exactly what has been in such desperately short supply during 2020—straightforward, unimpeachable testimony from a diverse group of people with on-the-ground working knowledge of what they’re speaking about, unencumbered by spin, diversion, or political gamesmanship.

Most of what the filmmakers cover in this movie will not be new information for anyone who’s been paying attention. But rather than focus on the daily controversies, talking points, and diversions of our destructive 24-hour news cycle, this two-hour documentary pulls back to examine the step-by-step encroachment of the virus and how the Trump administration and a number of government agencies mishandled (or entirely failed to handle) each aspect of the pandemic. 

The intellectually and ideologically siloed American citizenry are presented as both the victims and enablers of the virus and the US’s spectacular failure to properly contain the virus. Gibney never resorts to the kind of cheap shots or infotainment simplifications that now seem de rigueur for political documentaries. The film only uses footage from cable “news” hosts when absolutely necessary, and clips from political comedian monologues are mostly absent. Cellphone footage of Americans fighting about mask wearing and the like are also kept at a minimum. Instead, the filmmakers rely on interviews with people who speak from their own lived experience working for the public, not people who work for political parties or corporations.

Perhaps a little too much time is devoted to the behind-the-scenes specifics of how these interviews were conducted safely during the pandemic, but for the most part, these interviews are clear and direct. Two of the most insightful come from Michael Bowen, a Trump voter in charge of America’s only remaining major N95 mask manufacturer, who lobbied the government to step up PPE production; and Max Kennedy Jr., grandson of Robert Kennedy, who volunteered to be part of Jared Kushner’s COVID-19 Supply Chain Task Force only to discover there was no actual task force.

The filmmakers continuously compare our nation’s response to that of South Korea, which, like so many other nations, contained the outbreak and its economic repercussions far more successfully than we did, by putting scientists rather than politicians and businessmen in charge of their response. But there’s no avoiding the fact that our country’s long-held distrust of government as well as our unwavering belief in free-market capitalism as the ultimate solution to every problem, played a tremendous role in our failures with COVID-19.

Totally Under Control is getting a limited release in drive-ins and streaming platforms prior to the 2020 presidential election, but I don’t imagine it will have much effect on that election’s outcome. This infuriating, though distinctly non-inflammatory, documentary will probably play-to-the-choir in much the same way as the bias and ideologically warped work of popular political documentarians like Michael Moore on the Left and Dinesh D'Souza on the Right. Still, the movie serves as a critical example of how to cut through the noise, spin, and opportunistic punditry that passes for contemporary news and put unvarnished facts together to inform the viewers.