As Democratic voters lick their wounds after a crushing defeat in the recent presidential election, a film like American Pastoral is unlikely to bring much solace, but it does offer a useful, thumbnail glimpse of the obstacles they’ve always faced. Meticulously tracing the course of school board elections in the small, largely conservative district of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, this entirely non-intrusive documentary by French journalist and filmmaker Aubrey Edler offers no account or commentary on the fraught standoff between ideologically moderate Democrats and the Labor Party. . The local Republican Party is led by far-right Christian nationalism. Instead, Edler’s quietly observing film—which premiered in main competition at IDFA, and is sure to travel farther on the strength of its sharp gaze and topical heft—trusts viewers to see the National Forest for the trees.
To many non-American audiences, the idea that school board elections are a partisan issue of community-wide importance—campaigned and voted on even by populations without school-age children—may seem strange. But Edler, a former TV anchor with a keen eye for the social dangers underpinning seedy local politics, quickly established this seemingly small-scale event as a battleground for all sorts of culture wars currently consuming the country at large, from LGBTQ rights to critical race. Gun control theory. American Pastoral has a title that reflects both rural idealism and the right’s insistent Christianity, and it echoes the public work of Frederick Wiseman in revealing community spirit through town halls, church gatherings, and administrative affairs.
As her own photographer, Edler avoids interviews or any form of editing—the film even dispenses with on-screen titles to identify key characters and locations, instead allowing viewers to chart this geographic and social terrain themselves. This also allows for some apparent ambiguity: in a city that is fairly uniform in its comfortable whiteness, there is little way to guess in advance where individuals might come across on particular polarizing political issues.
The introductory scenes of the candidates going door to door in March 2023, eight months before the election, clearly delineate the lines of conflict. Republicans like Tina Wilson happily deal before sowing fears among residents about schoolchildren suddenly changing genders or being sexually groomed through supposedly inappropriate library books. Democrats like Christy Moore are more nervously warning of the “scary” prospect of Republicans gaining a majority on the school board, and are demanding protections for vulnerable minorities in classrooms.
It won’t take long to see that Moore and her teammates have a long way to go to climb the steepest hill. If at first it appears that “American Pastoralism” spends more time at Republican events and rallies than any of its Democratic counterparts, the superior resources and numbers that the right enjoys in this red-leaning region will soon become clear. It turns out that Republican candidates like Wilson, along with current board members James Emery and married couple Danielle and Stephen Lindemuth, are all devout worshipers of the radical Lifegate Church in Elizabethtown.
At board meetings in the run-up to the election, Democrats expressed concerns that LifeGate was targeting the school board with a white supremacist theocratic vision. (Their opponents focus less on denying this than on discrediting the left.) There’s a noticeable disconnect between the politics creeping into the board and what appears to be the generally progressive mindset of school staff: teachers joke with their students that their approved versions of A Streetcar Named Desire might be considered dangerous, and try to have open classroom discussions about gun violence. (One is surprised, after a quick survey, to find that most of his students support the Second Amendment.) Meanwhile, moderate Superintendent Karen Neal worries that the board will soon ask her and other school employees to act against their own teaching principles.
Beyond the immediate matter at hand, Edler sits in on other community gatherings that clearly lay out the lay of the land: a women’s firearms workshop called “Girl and the Gun,” and a support group of Christian men discussing the need for “church factions” in the area. A “spiritual battle” against the left, a well-attended outdoor anti-choice demonstration, or a more intimate backyard barbecue where Emery (an omnipresent community presence) sings his praises to the January 6 sit-in. In contrast, the sidewalk gathering of Freedom Readers, a liberal group of parents and teachers against book bans, is much more subdued.
There’s little suspense, then, about the election outcome in an area where “Fuck Biden” flags hang from many front porches. But Adler and editor Barbara Pascoe maintain a sense of urgency in this two-hour film by highlighting human convictions and foibles amid a surplus of increasingly ugly rhetoric: Republicans are certain, if unwisely, that they are saving the soul of their community and Democrats are grimly facing defeat. And they find a way to survive in the place they still consider home.
In some scenes, “American Pastoral” finds biting comedy in the ideological impasse between these factions: At one town hall meeting, a Republican state representative argues that residents have “the right to defend themselves from a tyrannical government,” before one realizes With confusion. One attendee points out that he is part of the state government himself. In the midst of all this back and forth, meanwhile, the voices of the young people most directly affected by the school board changes are not being heard, and they are completely disenfranchised on this issue. Children may be the future, but no one is letting them lead the way yet.