Some People Think This New Documentary Is The Best Movie About Journalism Ever Made

Not only has 2020 — which has convulsed almost unceasingly with one terrible surprise after another — been a banner year for journalism, in that the Fourth Estate has served as the prism through which we’ve taken a closer look at everything from the 2020 presidential election to the coronavirus pandemic, racial struggles in the US, and the sputtering economy.

This would be the year, wouldn’t it, that also gives us a new documentary about journalism itself, one that some people are saying may even be the best movie ever made about the profession.

To be sure, certain audiences may have already affixed that distinction quietly in their own minds to a classic like All The President’s Men or to a journalism-adjacent feature film like Citizen Kane. Picture if you will, though, an edge-of-your-seat thriller that’s combined the dogged reportage at the heart of Spotlight and mixed with the paranoia of The Manchurian Candidate. That’s how one reviewer describes Collective, Romanian director Alexander Nanau’s new documentary about the unflinching journalists who decided to probe the aftermath of a 2015 fire at a popular club in Bucharest that was the result of pyrotechnics gone wrong during a show by a metal band.

Twenty-seven people immediately died on the scene as a result of the fire. But for several months afterward, people mysteriously kept dying — from injuries that seemed like they should have been manageable, until the ultimate toll rose to 64 victims. How does that happen?

Thus the stage is set for a cinematic excursion into what most people think of when they try to imagine the life of a scoop-hungry investigative reporter — but rather than the romanticized ideal, you learn that it’s less about setting off on some grand mission to right wrongs than it is to stumble blindly into a proverbial pitch-black tunnel, unsure of what waits for you at the end. That’s what the calls to sources, the stakeouts, the rifling through documents, and all the reportorial tedium is meant to bring about. Delivering the reporter to whatever awaits at the end.

Collective, which at the time of this writing has both a perfect critics score and perfect audience rating on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, was released via VOD on November 20, so it’s available to watch now. And you should, because if 2020 taught us anything, it’s that journalists are essential workers in their own right — something this documentary underscores to such a degree that it might even take your breath away.

Watching Collective, it’s hard not to be reminded of that old maxim about news being what somebody wants to keep hidden, while everything else is mere publicity. There are exceedingly venal bad guys in this movie, held to account by the reporters, and they include government bureaucrats and functionaries as well as a corrupt health care system in the country. You sort of know what’s coming early on, and sense the shape of things to come during one particular scene early on in the documentary. It’s a news conference, during which the camera turns at one point to a Catalin Tolontan, editor-in-chief of the Gazeta Sporturilor newspaper. He’s talking with a female colleague. They’re skeptical of the proceedings, about the non-explanations for why victims of the club fire are still dying, months after the fact. “The authorities lied to us,” Tolontan says, which is as much a declaration of fact as it is a mission statement. He and the paper’s reporters spend the duration of the film on the hunt, sniffing out leads, handling sources, and all the other prerequisites that reporters around the globe fill their days with. Pecking away at keyboards on deadline. Making the calls. Chasing down the best version of the truth.

Collective has it all. Shadowy villains, government corruption, brides, a helpless populace angry for justice, and journalists who just want to make a small corner of the world a little bit better.

Here’s a sampling of the praise for Collective from reviewers, most of whom insist this is a profoundly relevant and very of-the-moment, must-watch film, in spite of its being set far away from the collapse of institutionalized norms that’s played out to catastrophic effect in the US over the course of this year:

From The New York Times
NYT
’ Manohla Dargis, Collective “sketches out an honest, affecting, somewhat old-fashioned utopian example of what it takes to make the world better, or at least a little less awful.”

From Ann Hornady, of The Washington Post, “Nanau has made an informative documentary about a story that most Americans never heard of, and pulls the lens back just enough to encapsulate the low and dishonest age of global populism.”

And, finally, this, from The Times of the UK film critic Kevin Maher: “Newspaper journalism has rarely appeared so intense and urgent as it does in this gripping Romanian documentary about whistleblowers, criminal practices and wholesale corruption within the country’s medical establishment.”

As reviews like these attest, taking the film in is to behold the twin poles of the journalistic experience simultaneously. One is likely to come away with a kind of fist held aloft solidarity with the journalist-as-quiet-insurrectionist, who storms the balustrade of obstructionism to procure some semblance of the truth. But there’s a sadness that lives just below the surface and the events laid out in Collective, too. A reminder that reporters fight every day against a stacked deck in a house that always wins, with whole institutions tilted against them and hidden behind unscalable walls. Such that the only way to wreck the sorry structure of lies is to get lucky enough to find that one loose brick that will start a chain reaction before, the secrets finally brought to light, it brings the whole thing crashing down.