13th (2016)

Netflix opens its vaults and Ava DuVernay walks us through the American penal system, beginning with a statistic from Barack Obama about population and prisoners that lands like a bill arriving after a very large dinner. The title refers to the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery except as punishment for crime, an exception the film treats as the load-bearing wall of everything that follows. Convict leasing, Jim Crow, the war on drugs, mandatory sentencing: the through-line is drawn with the patience of someone connecting pipes in a basement.

The interview roster is deep and largely African American, with Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, Jelani Cobb, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. doing the heavy lifting. DuVernay has assembled a formidable bench, and the film gives its women experts real room, though it never turns its attention to a distinct set of questions about gender. The economic argument is where the knives come out. Private prisons, corporate lobbying, rural towns built on cell blocks, the American Legislative Exchange Council drafting legislation for legislators who may not have read it. The profit motive gets a thorough audit, and the audit does not come back clean.

As cinema, the film prefers the lecture hall to the campfire. Statistics arrive in orderly ranks, experts speak in measured tones, and the final sequence of police shooting footage functions as a closing argument delivered without a closing argument. It is rigorous, it is furious, and it is entirely certain of its verdict. We are told what to think and why, at length, with footnotes. The result is a documentary that works as an indictment and as a syllabus, which is either its greatest strength or its most exhausting habit. The sommelier's note: a full-bodied vintage, served at room temperature, no dessert.