Mark Reviews Movies: HOMEROOM

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 11, 2021

Sometimes, events beyond a filmmaker's control influence or interfere with the making, the access, and/or the general thrust of a documentary. Life gets in the way, or in the case of Homeroom, life comes nearly to a complete stop.

We can sense it coming in director Peter Nicks' documentary, which follows the senior class of Oakland High School, starting with the beginning of the school year in 2019. We know what's coming, and there's a decided chill when a teacher, simply talking about preparing for a forthcoming assignment, proclaims, "Tomorrow is looming."

It most certainly was. All of these students and Nicks himself, though, couldn't know what was looming—when the cameras started following students in class and in the halls, as Nicks began selecting subjects whose stories seem the most compelling, as all of that footage and all of those stories began to form some kind of through line for a narrative about political activism, performance, and an emerging sense of self-fulfillment.

This documentary, then, is divided into two major sections: the movie Nicks started to make in the fall and the one, because of events beyond anyone's control, he had to make, once an actual worldwide fall of sorts occurred. Unluckily for the filmmaker, certain students and entire threads of narrative have to be abandoned once school is shut down in March 2020, on account of the still-ongoing global pandemic. Luckily for Nicks, a few of these students found a way to continue their passion, even while remaining at home.

In retrospect, one can sense the director tipping the narrative scales in that first section, as Nicks concentrates on the student government and particularly Denilson Garibo, a senior who serves—as stated repeatedly and proudly by the teen—as the representative of 36,000 students. In Garibo's position, he has an occasional seat on the district's school board, which has made considerable budget re-adjustments in the past year—most of them cutting programs that could and almost certainly would have directly benefited a good number of those thousands.

Further cuts are almost certain to come. Garibo and several others in the student-representation group, almost pre-echoing a sentiment that will become national news in a few months from then, come up with their suggestion for how to find the money for those eliminated or at-risk programs. The school district of Oakland has its own police department, and its budget accounts for millions of dollars. Cut them, and all of that money could be put toward the students and their needs.

Would Nicks have so focused on this group and these meetings, if the pandemic and, after the high-profile killings of a series of Black men and women by police, a national cry to re-adjust the budgets and re-conceptualize the purpose of police departments across the country hadn't occurred? It's tough to say. The group, with Garibo and his clear passion for politics at its head, and its case are compelling, so they certainly would have been at or near the top of documentary's narrative hierarchy.

Some of the other students, whom we briefly meet and occasionally see, outside of the group seem to have some promise, too. In a theater class, one teen girl discusses why she finds acting so rewarding. As March approaches, the school's drama club is rehearsing a musical, which is set to be performed about a week after the school—as well as the entire district and beyond—ended up shutting down. Whatever these specific students and all of these stories could have done, in general and for the documentary itself, will never be known. Posters, promising the musical's performance, hang from the walls of the shut-down building, as a montage of seemingly static images show us the emptiness, the untapped potential, and the lost opportunities of the school and, as the scope of those images broadens, the entire city.

The documentary itself, then, becomes a thing of untapped potential and lost opportunity. Nicks clearly knows this, as a post-lockdown confusion seems to set in for everyone (There's a stark, pre-lockdown reminder of how little we knew and how much we had to guess about the disease that would soon spread around the planet, as a group students hypothesize and wonder about whether or not they're sick and how to prevent themselves from becoming ill).

Everything more or less stops. Prom plans come and go unrealized. Graduation is delayed and then is announced as a virtual event.

Garibo and his student organization's idea that the Oakland district eliminate its police force, though, receive a second chance, as those awful killings happen one after another, until it finally seems as if the entire country has had enough. The second section of the movie feels a bit rushed (because so little that actually would have continued any of the stories here was happening), and that, unfortunately, is also true of this next set of board meetings, the build-up to the vote, and the students' awareness that, if there ever was a time for real activism, this is it.

It's impossible to blame Nicks and Homeroom in general for failing to live up to their established goals. We can, though, be disappointed that neither adapts in a way that helps to make and give a sense of the way this world and life changed, as they were being filmed.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products