Red, White and Blue, one of the Academy Award-nominated live action short films this year, is a topical film that will no doubt be popular with its audience, as it is an advocacy/propaganda pro-abortion (OK, pro-“choice”) film. It’s basically a “Here’s the kind of thing that can happen now that y’all overturned Roe” dramatization.
I recognized it as manipulative in a sense, as taking the most extreme case, with a maximally sympathetic victim, to beat the anti-abortion folks with. But on the merits, I’m very much on the pro-choice side of the issue myself, and I too find the anti-abortionists positively infuriating in forcing their religion and superstition-based moral beliefs on everyone else. Even if the overwhelming majority of people in real life that they harm or inconvenience aren’t nearly as sympathetic as the family in this film, even if there are plenty of gray area cases, I admit I got caught up in this film. I experienced it as no worse than tied for the most emotionally powerful of the five Oscar nominees in this category this year (a year in which four of the five are on really heavy subjects). I felt for the people at the center of this film, I rooted for them, and it made me feel even more appalled by anti-abortionists and the politicians who cater to them.
The film opens with a waitress, a single mother with two young children (daughter about 11, son maybe 8—something like that), at her workplace. She is in the hallway outside the restrooms, holding a pregnancy test and looking not at all happy about what she sees.
She wants an abortion, but unfortunately she lives in Arkansas, where the post-Roe anti-abortion laws are particularly draconian. She gathers what information she can, and finds that the closest place she can get the health care she needs is Illinois.
But she has no money to speak of. She has no one to turn to that could help her in that regard. She’s never been out of the state. She has no experience with any of this. She’d have to miss work, and the income that comes with it. She’d have to figure out what to do with her kids.
But she’s desperate, so she’s determined to make it happen. She just doesn’t know how.
The next day, or soon thereafter anyway, she is back at work. One of her customers is a lone older woman, who unbeknownst to her had seen her looking distraught over that pregnancy test. In a low voice the woman asks her, “How much do you need?” She is taken aback, unable at first to interpret what she is being asked, until the woman says enough to clarify it, and then slips her some money. Not a huge amount, but in the circumstances maybe just barely enough.
I don’t know that it’s all that believable that this woman could have inferred all that she did from catching a glimpse of a woman looking at a pregnancy test, but whatever. I’m just glad that angels like her exist.
The woman is able to secure childcare for her son. She brings her daughter with her, presenting the trip as an opportunity for a fun mother-daughter adventure.
My mind kept going back to the fact that there are so many people hellbent on trying to make the abortion process as difficult as possible for people like her. And though I’ve described Red, White and Blue as a propaganda film presenting a case that will make the anti-abortion side look as bad as possible, really the film could easily have included even more factors of that kind. It could have had her tricked by one of those faux abortion clinic, “crisis pregnancy” places that dishonest anti-abortion people set up to lure unwary women seeking an abortion. It could have had her deal with mandatory waiting periods and mandatory multiple visits, making it even more unrealistic for her to accomplish her goal in a way compatible with her job and childcare responsibilities. It could have had her harassed by anti-abortion zealots when she tried to enter a clinic. It could have had the clinic she intended to go to closed because one of the doctors had just been assassinated.
In any case, it’s plenty harrowing enough as it is, plenty infuriating. Especially when a true gut punch of a twist is added when she gets to the clinic, rendering this an even more appalling case.
Red, White and Blue hits hard; it’s a good to very good film, with a low degree of difficulty given its subject matter and what side it’s on.
None of the live action shorts were quite at the level of the very best of past years for me, films like Feeling Through or The Red Suitcase. But there were multiple that I liked quite a bit. If I were forced to pick a favorite, or at least to pick the one that reached me the deepest emotionally, I think I’d go with Red, White and Blue. Or at worst it would be roughly tied with Invincible, with Knight of Fortune being fairly close as well.
Philo on Movies 