Movie Review – Welfare

Welfare (1975)
Directed by Frederick Wiseman

Frederick Wiseman has made his career focusing on institutions, and while he has branched off in later years ever so slightly, the most significant change in his method of filmmaking is going from tight 90-minute movies to large sprawling epics. It makes sense; the topics of his work are vast & challenging to grasp. You need time to let them breathe and for narratives to emerge. Welfare clocks in at nearly three hours long. I argue passionately that not only is this Wiseman’s masterpiece, but it is also one of the greatest documentary films ever made. Within this relatively short time, the audience will experience every stage of life and almost every element that brings drama into our lives.

Set over weeks at a New York City welfare claims office, Wiseman follows the stories of multiple people seeking help to survive in a ruthless world. The audience gets an up-close look at the well-meaning bureaucrats trying to make the best out of the insufficient system they work within and those who have become jaded and conditioned themselves to feel nothing for the desperate people who step in front of their desks. The sense you get from the film’s incredible closing scene is that the system was designed to inhibit people from getting aid.

Throughout the film, we see people in a lot of psychological distress. They don’t come to the welfare office with much hope instilled in them through the system’s design, which is to be as miserable and hopeless as possible. Many of these people are elderly, have a disability, or both. Some are despondent, some are angry, and some try to find dark humor in such dire circumstances. A German immigrant overheard while chatting with a stranger in the waiting room brings up the old adage that “God only helps those who help themselves” and follows it up with, “I’d better look for a nice place to hang myself.”

Housing is a constant issue among those in need. Women are trying to escape abusive situations, young men sleeping on a friend’s couch and about to be kicked out with no place to go, and disabled people are desperate for money to stay in a rundown hotel room for at least one more night. The alternative for them all is homelessness, and nearly fifty years later, that fear is looming large over a lot of people in the States. The percentage of working Americans who are also homeless is at an all-time high, ultimately knocking the wind out of the old argument that homeless people are “just lazy.” As someone who has lived in poverty, I can tell you that it is one of the most exhausting jobs you’d ever have, one that keeps you moving until you just want to collapse. 

There’s a fascinating back-and-forth between a Black security guard at the front desk and a mentally disabled military veteran with a visible scar where his head was injured. The old man claims he was jumped on the street by Black and brown people. Maybe he was. It is clear his grip on reality is quite loose, and he’s a mean son of bitch, ranting at the Black security guard, making racist overtures while the officer on duty tries to humor him as best he can and remain professional. Eventually, a group of Black guards that work in the building forced the old man out of the building as his business there is done, and he’s not just lingering to antagonize. I can’t help but feel sorry for the old man because the system has completely failed him. I am also extremely disappointed that he doesn’t seem capable of learning the much-needed lesson of solidarity.

There are moments of such excellent interactions between humans that you begin to sense we are in the realm of the hyperreal. The words people utter feel like they are taking on mythic proportions while never feeling overwrought or overdramatic. There’s a young Black man who got a job, an apartment, and a dog. He’s lost everything by the time we meet him except the dog. The welfare office offers him a room in a hostel. The catch, of course, is no dogs allowed. If you are someone who has had a pet, the idea of breaking that connection with them is a no-go. 

The official retorts, “We’re giving assistance to you, not your dog.”

The young man responds, “I don’t say it’s right. I say it’s necessary. . . I’m waiting for something that will never come: justice.”

If you have bought into the concept of welfare “fraud,” I can’t see how you could still believe that to be true, watching the impossible hoops people are made to jump through. It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare where you’re always on the wrong floor, and the floor you need doesn’t have anyone to help you today. We must remember that Wiseman was chronicling the pre-Clinton era of welfare. When Bill Clinton passed his welfare reform, people received even less but had to do more. Anyone in the States who still thinks that country has anything close to a functioning welfare system is about as ignorant as they come.

As we can see in this film, the people who need it the most are marginalized by race, disability, gender, sexuality, and age. A mentally disabled Black woman pleads tearfully to get money for her hotel and goes through a roundabout explanation with her case worker. She struggles to understand that the welfare office (state) sent her case to Social Security (which is federal), and it seems the welfare office made mistakes in processing checks she had to deliver to them. The result is increased housing instability, and the woman fails to get the help she needs in this dire moment.

What Wiseman shows us in Welfare is the actual American story: a system composed of institutions engaged in the slow-motion mass murder of swaths of marginalized people. Because this is the death of a thousand cuts, people who have more privilege can convince themselves that if only those in need of welfare worked harder, they wouldn’t be in this situation. That glazes over how difficult it can be to get hired for any job if you have a visible disability, how single mothers struggle to cover child care on top of holding down a job, how all these people were “educated” in a system that refuses to be honest with them about economics, wages, and finance. 

Wiseman delivers a magnum opus centered on radical empathy, the embrace of all humanity. He points his camera at each subject with full recognition of their inherent dignity so that no one comes across the fool or the villain, or the butt of a joke. Each face you see is a complete human being living an existence of all the same complications you or I have or will face. Maybe we won’t ever need financial support from the state. That won’t be because we are such hard workers who never needed help. It will be because of the random birth lottery we are forced to take part in, where possibilities are decided in utero based on a host of aspects none of us can control.