The 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting left 26 dead, including 20 small children. The searing documentary Newtown tells the stories of the deceased, but its true subject is survival. Those who got out alive that December day in the bucolic Connecticut town of Newtown, and the loved ones of those who didn't, had to find a way to keep going, one moment to the next. This film is about their bravery, their bond, their bottomless grief.
It does them proud.
🎙️ Podcast: Kim Snyder discusses Newtown on KERA's THINK:
Premiering Monday on KERA, Newtown is a tale of ordinary people enduring extraordinarily painful circumstances. As one grieving parent asks, "Who knows how to do this?" He then answers his own question: "There's no way to do this." But he does it nonetheless. He keeps getting out of bed every morning. Like the other residents of his shell-shocked town, he tries to find a semblance of normalcy, knowing full well that normal is no longer in the playbook.
It's instructive to note what Newtown is not. It's not a tearjerker: Director/producer Kim A. Snyder doesn't indulge in more emotional manipulation than the material inherently offers. It's not a procedural. It doesn't meticulously piece together the events of that day. Tower, the innovative 2016 documentary about the 1966 shooting at the University of Texas at Austin, used that approach to devastating effect. But Newtown is a different animal.
Nor is it an anti-gun screed, though some of the most powerful passages belong to three victims' parents who try to explain to the powers that be why an unhinged sociopath shouldn't have access to assault rifles. Speaking of which, Newtown isn't a profile of the shooter. The name Adam Lanza appears only in passing. This isn't his show.
Those three parents, Mark Barden, Nicole Hockley and David Wheeler, are Newtown's beating heart.
Barden, who lost his son Daniel, peruses photos of the family at a tree farm the week before the shooting. "This is the last few days of life as we knew it," he explains, and describes a burning need to know what his son's last few moments were like.
Hockley is a steady influence on her fellow grievers, though she remains haunted by the death of her son, Dylan. "Is this real?" she asks. "Did he ever really exist?"
Wheeler, who lost his son Ben, expresses similar fears of letting his child disappear into the past: "We're all terrified of forgetting what he looked like, what he sounded like." Forgetting, it seems, is even more painful than remembering.
Hanging over this portrait of a specific time and place is the fact that this could happen anymore, and will likely continue to. Newtown, with its endless green lawns, tight-knit families and beaming children, looks like a paradise on Earth. The film reminds us that such impressions are fragile in the modern world.
And so the living move ahead, lives forever damaged but still seeking hope. Some of that hope will appear onscreen soon: The new documentary Midsummer in Newtown details a Newtown community theater production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, starring some of the children who survived the shooting.
The trauma and loss can never be undone, but art, and film, can still offer a little salve.
Independent Lens presents "Newtown" at 8 p.m. April 3 on KERA-TV (Ch. 13). Online streaming begins April 4 on pbs.org.
