A sit-in gets most of its dramatic force from the number of things people have to do after they have decided to stay. Bodies need rest, supplies have to get through a door and an action that looked like a single decision to the people outside it has to be renewed by the people inside. Being Heumann has an excellent subject in that ongoing work. Siân Heder follows Judy Heumann into the 1977 Section 504 protest in San Francisco, with a coalition demanding that the government put existing disability rights protections into practice. Ruth Madeley makes the decision to remain feel like something a person keeps doing in company.
Madeley has an alert comic sense of how much time a bureaucrat can spend making a person repeat a request. Heumann can detect the delay and still have to decide what sort of response the people in the room will be able to use. That distinction gives her leadership a life beyond making speeches. A protest needs someone who can interpret the evasions of an opponent. It also needs someone who can hear a legitimate complaint from a tired person on her own side and recognize the risk of treating it as one more obstacle.
The group’s ability to sustain itself depends on relationships that a standard account of a government decision could easily leave at the margins. Support from the Black Panthers, who brought food to the San Francisco occupiers, gives the campaign a material connection to other organizing in the city. A meal can make solidarity visible at a point when even a person indifferent to the language of the protest has to reckon with the amount of time it can last. The film has an excellent opportunity in moments like this to let the practical use of an alliance register before anyone needs to describe its historical significance.
The building gives Heder a means of showing how provisional a group’s freedom of movement can be. An entrance, a lift or a phone can become a political issue before anybody has spoken. The picture is at its most involving when the space makes an abstract demand immediately legible. Outside support matters for much the same reason. A person who can bring food or information into a building can change the amount of time a coalition has to insist on its rights. Such a contribution is easier to understand when the movie has shown what a day inside asks of the people eating and waiting.
A film built around one especially vivid organizer can make collective action easier to follow. It can also make other people enter the frame largely to demonstrate that the organizer has found a way to move them. Heder’s ensemble is at its best when people have a different assessment of how long they can stay or of which compromise would threaten their own interests. The familiar pacing of a historical drama sometimes directs too much attention toward the reply the officials are going to give. The relationship that matters in the intervening time is often between two people who need a different thing from the room in which they have agreed to remain.
The use of a federal office as the central space has another consequence. A group able to give that building a different daily life can make accessibility intelligible through its absence as well as through speeches about it. Heder gains energy whenever the arrangements people have devised inside are allowed to be clever, funny or a little improvised. Disability rights can become a dramatically inert subject if the film assumes people are only waiting to be included in a world someone else has made. Madeley gives the protest some of its best life by making its participants look like people who are already busy making the conditions they need.
Madeley can give anger a very immediate use without treating its expression as a finished accomplishment. She can also make a joke feel like a way to read what the other people in a room are still capable of doing together. Those qualities help the movie keep some of the campaign’s present tense even as the outcome approaches. The achievement has weight because there is enough evidence of how many different people had to wake up and keep making it possible.
