“At the Ready”: Film review | Sundance 2021

Principal Maisie Crow follows a group of El Paso high school students through a law enforcement training program during a life-changing year.

One of the big breakthroughs at Sundance last year was the documentary Boys state, in which high school students played the mechanics of American democracy with both inspiring and disheartening results.

Hitting a somewhat similar sweet spot is Maisie Crow’s On loan, another documentary portrait of Texas teens dipping their toes into the professional waters of adults. If the image of children experiencing parliamentary procedure and political debate disturbed you, wait to spend 100 minutes watching students learn about prohibition warrants and active shooting procedures.On loan generates a lot of the same inspiration and concern, but the subject matter here makes it less of a pure crowd pleaser as the issues can be more specific and heartbreaking.

For On loan, Crow integrated into the law enforcement education program at Horizon High School in El Paso, aimed at training future police officers, security guards and, especially given the location of the school, border and immigration officers. Many of the students enrolled in the program are Latinxes, several first-generation Americans, and the film is set between 2018 and 2019 amid increased rhetoric from Trump, increased media coverage of border family separations and the Senate race between Ted Cruz. and Beto O’Rourke. It should be noted, for those who are worried about such things, that the 2019 El Paso mass shooting, an anti-immigrant hate crime, is not history.

While historical signposts feature in Crow’s tale, On loan Rather, it is part of a contest featuring the school’s criminal justice club participating in a series of judged procedural exercises. There is something to be disturbed about in the images of these young subjects walking through mock classrooms and stage apartments brandishing fake guns.

If you enter On loan with your ideology on border and law enforcement issues in place and most people will. Crow’s style, which is patient and observational, can be uncomfortable, clearly dogmatic, but without the dogma immediately expressed. His previous feature film, winner of an Emmy Jackson, was a documentary about abortion in Mississippi, a film in which you could usually feel the director’s point of view, but in which the anti-abortion faction had a full voice.

Topics in On loan are, by their very presence here, adolescents who revolve around the police. There are students who are dedicated to a terrifying degree, students who treat these training activities as an almost sadistic game and who willingly bring up the talking points of the Trump administration. They are not Crow’s star characters. Instead, she follows teenagers whose positions are nuanced, and the documentary chronicles their every journey.

Documentaries like this force us to make weird reflective judgments about topics too young to vote (or at least drink), and I’m as guilty as anyone for answering some Boys state numbers with, “Dude, I hate this guy” as if hating a 17-year-old based on a heavily edited documentary is a sane response. Overall, Crow wisely chose subjects that appear untrained at worst; she was going to go into that particular club and find someone who said, “I’m taking these classes because I think our immigration policy is a disaster and our police need to be dismantled.” They are all complicated, and your reading of their motivations and aspirations may change as their own understanding changes.

There’s Cristina, a young graduate eager to join the border patrol. She is the daughter of a proud immigrant who sees her daughter’s leadership as the epitome of the American dream, even though he understands that this choice will not necessarily make her popular in the community. There is Caesar, in conflict on his way as his father is across the border, having been deported after a drug offense. Finally, and perhaps most central, there is Mason, who turned out to be transgender after the filming of the documentary and who is known as “Kassy” here. Mason, struggling with the loneliness of an often absent trucker father, found a family at the Criminal Justice Club; the program’s instructors, all former law enforcement officers, make him the club commander for the school year.

A part of me sometimes watches Crow movies and wants them to run to judgment, to condemn the ex-buff cop spouting Ted Cruz talking points, to give an example of immature boys making jokes during preparation for the live filming. But that’s not who she is as a filmmaker. Crow, who is her own cinematographer, is characterized by her restraint: here, she holds back, letting her central characters learn their lessons as they go, letting the events of the story unfold without comment and leaving the Camera will capture the other students reacting naturally to the hallway war games that seem to take place after the last bell.

It is a patience which is generally rewarded, whether through self-questioning and self-discovery in front of Mason’s camera, Cristina’s slow political awakening or Caesar’s revealing experiences with his father. And everything takes place with much more refinement than that of Crow Jackson (available to watch on HBO Max), in which the ugliness of digital video played its own part in the harsh story being told.

The documentary isn’t as comprehensive or enlightening about border issues as something like Netflix’s Immigration nation, but the young heroes doOn loan a good vehicle through which many viewers can deal with their own preconceptions and opinions.

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (US Documentary Competition)
Production Companies: JustFilms, Ford Foundation, XTR, Anonymous Content, The Big Bend Sentinel and Fierce Films
Director and Cinematographer: Maisie Crow
Producers: Maisie Crow, Abbie Perrault, Hillary Pierce
Editors: Nina Vizcarrondo, Austin Reedy

100 minutes