‘Separated’: Venice Review

Dir: Errol Morris. US/Mexico. 2024. 93mins

In 2018, journalist Adam Serwer coined a phrase that summed up the Trump presidency in five words: “The cruelty is the point.” That cruelty is on full display in Separated, a sobering documentary from veteran filmmaker Errol Morris about the administration’s controversial immigration policy, which separated children from their parents as a deterrent to future asylum-seekers. While Morris’s attempt to personalise this humanitarian crisis by casting actors to play a mother and son crossing the border proves less than effective, Separated’s criticism of America’s dismissive attitude towards immigrants is sufficiently scathing. 

Morris is a master at finding colourful or galvanising interview subjects

Premiering at Venice in an Out Of Competition slot almost exactly a year after Morris’s John le Carre portrait The Pigeon Tunnel bowed at Telluride, Separated will be a timely proposition for US viewers with the presidential election a little over two months away. The film takes as its source material reporter Jacob Soboroff’s acclaimed 2020 book on the subject, also called Separated. (Soboroff is one of the film’s talking heads, joining conscientious policymakers who tried to stop the zero-tolerance strategy —and one clueless political appointee who blithely allowed it to continue.) Fans of Morris’ elegant, intelligent style will no doubt be intrigued, not to mention enraged.

The Oscar-winning documentarian recounts how, after taking office in January 2017, Trump took a harsher line on illegal immigration than previous presidents, hijacking the country’s unaccompanied-child programme and using it for any family that illegally crossed the border. Speaking to experts like Jonathan White, who was formerly part of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), Morris sets out how this traumatic policy removed children from their parents to deter other potential immigrants. 

As Separated constructs its argument, the film occasionally cuts to the fictional story of Gabriela (Gabriela Cartol) and Diego (Diego Armando Lara Lagunes), a mother and child making the treacherous journey from Guatemala to America, avoiding border guards while enduring harsh weather conditions. Providing the characters with no dialogue as they undergo this fraught odyssey, Morris positions them as a stand-in for myriad illegal immigrants forced to flee their homeland.

Morris is a master at finding colourful or galvanising interview subjects, and he has two in Separated — one heroic, the other much less so. White is an impassioned government employee who has dedicated his life to helping children, and his rage at the Trump administration is palpable. But he tempers that fury with multiple sobering anecdotes about how he fought an uphill battle against Trump’s appointees, who were determined to carry out the president’s wishes. One of them was Scott Lloyd, who became the unlikely head of ORR — his chief credential seemingly that he was willing to do Trump’s bidding. Where White is an articulate, principled individual, Lloyd comes across as spineless and not especially sharp. (In one of this despairing film’s rare moments of humour, Morris asks Lloyd if a damning story about his management style is “apocryphal” — Lloyd looks befuddled, possibly unsure what the word means.)

Cartol, superb in Lila Aviles’ 2018 drama The Chambermaid, gives a stripped-down, naturalistic performance, as does her young co-star. They are not meant to be playing three-dimensional characters but, rather, sympathetic symbols that help flesh out Separated’s policy discussions and alarming statistics. This fictional subplot provides a street-level view of the real lives impacted by Trump’s policy, but the straightforward narrative ends up feeling simplistic, reducing such immigrants to bland abstractions.

Still, it is hard to fault Morris’ intentions — or his refusal to offer a happy ending now that Trump is out of office. As Separated’s final moments demonstrate, the Biden administration may have moved away from some of its predecessor’s worst policies, but not all of them. And, of course, there is the possibility that Trump will regain the White House in November. And, as this film argues, many Americans are quick to blame immigrants for their troubles — and there are not enough laws in place to protect asylum seekers. Morris’ anger is directed mostly at Trump, but he wants all Americans to recognize their complicity.