Enemies of the State (2020 | USA | 103 minutes | Sonia Kennebeck)
The newest documentary from director/producer Sonia Kennebeck, director of the 2016 drone-whistleblower doc National Bird (as well as the 2021 SXSW-premiered but as-yet not-widely-released United States vs Reality Winner, another whistleblower doc), is very much of a piece with the subjects she’s made a career of exploring.
Matt DeHart claims he has been targeted by the United States government for having (although not disseminating) some classified documents that reveal explosive information regarding the CIA and FBI, which he may have acquired via his alleged involvement with the hacker collective Anonymous and his hosting of a private server on the dark web. He’s been imprisoned, exiled, and allegedly tortured, and his sweet military-veteran parents have been put through the ringer, all – he says – because of information he’s got on a flash drive, which nobody else but his mother has actually laid eyes on, as he keeps it hidden for his own safety.
But on a closer look, strands start to unravel from this seemingly straightforward, even distressingly common, whistleblower narrative. DeHart’s brought in on charges from an unrelated case: are they a fiction, a pretext upon which the government can seize his assets, or are they also horrifically real? Was DeHart’s mistreatment by the authorities specifically targeted to him as an enemy of the state, or is it actually just symptomatic of the general way prisoners in the United States are systematically mistreated? Are DeHart’s defenders truly simply passionate defenders of free speech and government transparency, or are they also operating with their own agendas? Can DeHart even be accurately called a “whistleblower” when he has not revealed these supposedly incendiary documents on which his argument rests?
A large percentage of this film is presented by way of reenactments with voiceover – court transcripts being performed by actors, or original audio set to reenacted visuals. In between these segments with a cast are more straightforward interviews with several subjects – DeHart’s parents, Paul and Leann DeHart, as well as a wide cast of lawyers, detectives, academics and more.
In both presentation and themes, a close cousin of this film is Bart Layton’s 2012 documentary thriller The Imposter (about the missing Texas child who turned up in Spain, or did he?). It’s also a clear descendant of The Thin Blue Line, so it’s no surprise to learn that this film was executive produced by Errol Morris.
These varied approaches to realism, and different levels of authenticity with which the material is presented, feed in exactly to what this documentary is actually most concerned with: the nature of truth itself.
Kennebeck resists the temptation to lay out easy answers to any of the questions she presents, instead daring viewers to reach our own conclusions, to hold multiple possibilities in our minds at once, and to ultimately get comfortable with the fact that at least at this stage, knowing the full truth of this case simply is not possible for us. Maybe it’s not an either/or – maybe many of these truths exist simultaneously; maybe DeHart is in fact both a hero and a villain. It’s a challenging exercise in sorting out truth from fiction, reassessing conclusions when new information comes to light, and resisting the urge to boil down complicated stories to simple sound bites. As the film’s opening quote from Oscar Wilde pithily puts it, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
After premiering at last year’s TIFF, Enemies of the State debuts for VOD rental from all your favorite outlets today.