In Being Heumann, Staying Put Is the Action
Siân Heder’s film is most alive in the work between speeches, when the people occupying a federal office have to find a way to remain there together.
There is a point in Being Heumann when an air conditioner becomes more important than anything a government official has to say. People occupying a federal office need to keep medication cold. The equipment already in the building has one purpose, and the protesters work out a way of giving it another. The historical record describes the same adaptation. In a movie about the 1977 Section 504 sit-in, it is a small, unusually precise image of what the people in the building are doing. They are insisting on a change in the terms of public life while making enough of a life together to sustain the insistence.
Siân Heder has a vivid lead in Ruth Madeley, whose Judy Heumann can turn a delayed reply into something the audience feels in the room. The film has ample reason to follow her. The longer it stays with the occupation, the more its drama depends on things an unusually forceful person cannot provide alone. Food has to come from somewhere, information has to reach people who need it, and a person with one set of needs may have time and knowledge that make another person’s next day possible. The political result has a place in the story because the film can show how much ordinary work stands between the decision to occupy a building and the ability to remain in it.
A law and the work of making it usable
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibited discrimination on the basis of disability in programs receiving federal financial assistance. The regulations that would put the provision into effect had still gone unsigned when activists organized protests around the country in 1977. The San Francisco occupation lasted nearly a month. That interval is worth keeping in mind because it gives the demand a particularly clear dramatic form. People already had language on which they could make a claim. They had experience of what it meant for an institution to keep finding reasons to defer the consequences of that language.
The film is most persuasive when a delay looks like something with costs on both sides of a door. An official can put a conversation off and preserve the impression that the matter is being considered. The person required to call again has to arrange another day around a decision that has already failed to arrive. Madeley knows how much comedy can live in the difference between those two experiences. Heumann can recognize the insult in an exchange and still have to work out what an angry or funny response will make possible. A film content to give her a succession of correct things to say would have a much less demanding role for its lead.
The building offers a useful check on any temptation to treat the conflict as a competition between speeches. People have specific reasons to want a door, a phone or a room to work differently. A regulation can appear remote until the film shows the consequences of a missing facility in a space whose ordinary occupants have never had to account for it. The political question acquires shape in the way somebody has to ask for a small part of the day to be made possible. Some of the most effective passages are those in which the characters already know what is missing and the audience has to catch up.
The film gets something similar from the problem of making information move. A building can permit one person to take in a conversation while giving somebody else no reliable access to it. People who organize around that problem already understand the difference between a room being open and a meeting being available to the people supposedly included in it. Their responses can look inventive on screen because the obstacle has been made so ordinary. It takes a little time to show who can hear, who can see and who is expected to repeat what has happened. That time is part of how the movie makes the political argument specific.
A meal can extend the occupation
The Black Panthers helped feed the San Francisco protesters. The film has the good judgment to allow that support a concrete use. A meal can be an act of solidarity and also simply the thing people need to get through the evening. The two meanings make each other more legible. It is easy to recognize an alliance in a history book and harder to see what it did at the point when an occupation could still fail. Bringing food to a federal building changes the amount of time the people inside it can insist on staying. That is a consequence a film can make visible without having to stop the action to explain the value of solidarity.
This is where the ensemble has the potential to complicate the shape of the familiar historical drama. People need different forms of assistance and can have different opinions about who should speak or what the next move ought to be. The possibility of depending on someone with whom you disagree gives the occupation a lively internal scale. Heder has room to let a joke or an accommodation become part of the group’s ability to remain in the building. When the story follows only the most recognizable negotiators, it loses some access to the people making the negotiations possible.
Heumann’s attention is valuable because a roomful of people can have real uses for a person who notices when a new obligation is about to be imposed on somebody already doing a great deal. Madeley has an appealing impatience in the role. It gives Heumann a means of detecting a delaying tactic, and it can also make a conversation with a tired ally harder to navigate. The best version of leadership the film presents is a task with consequences that change depending on who is in the room. Heder’s instinct to keep the central figure in focus works when it leaves enough other people visible for their response to matter.
What happens after the room has listened
There is a real attraction to the moments when somebody finally says something an official has to hear. An audience has been waiting for a response, and the structure of a historical movie can help people who come to the story without much context understand what has changed. That reward is worth having. It can also make it easy to remember the occupation as a set of obstacles Heumann cleared on the way to a decisive encounter. The film’s much livelier evidence is in the decisions it records between those turns. For any one of those days to end with a room still occupied, many people had to agree on what they could do for one another.
A scene can also make the people outside the frame matter by giving the people inside it a moment of rest. The movie’s bursts of humor have some of that effect. A laugh can show how well people know one another after only a few days together, and it can give the next disagreement the advantage of a relationship the audience has already seen operate. There is a larger historical claim in those moments than the dialogue has to make. The protesters are working out what it takes for their own coalition to include people with different demands on the same space.
That is why the air conditioner stays with me. An object provided for the ordinary comfort of a federal office can be made to meet a need its designers never considered. The people making the change have other places they could reasonably be and larger demands they have every reason to keep pressing. For a while, the achievement belongs to the small question of how somebody will get through the night. Being Heumann has its most convincing idea of political action when it can see the importance of that question and the ingenuity of the people who answer it.
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