To date, most of director Robert Greene’s films have been self-reflexive documentaries about the creation of performances. Fake It So Real (2011) looked at a group of amateur wrestlers in North Carolina as they worked on a WWE-style stage show; Actress (2014) profiled stage and TV performer Brandy Burre; and Kate Plays Christine (2016) followed actress Kate Lyn Sheil as she learned about the late TV news anchor Christine Chubbuck in order to play her in an imaginary film. Greene’s latest, Bisbee ’17, also concerns performance, surveying various townspeople in the title Arizona community as they prepare to reenact the Bisbee Deportation of 1917, a horrific historical episode in which roughly 2,000 deputized men rounded up almost 1,200 striking copper miners, loaded them onto freight trains, and deposited them in the New Mexico desert, leaving them to die. Yet the film is about way more than the reenactment—it’s about the ways that people create and use history and how America’s past interacts with its present. It feels like the grand statement that Greene has been building up to this whole decade, bringing together his various thematic interests (not just performance, but also self-delusion, education, and the quirks of regional American life) to symphonic effect.
The subject granted the most screen time in Bisbee ’17 is a young Mexican-American man named Fernando Serrano who’s lived in the town since childhood and now works as a cook. Greene notes early on Serrano’s personal investment in the historical reenactment; after reading a text stating that nearly 90 percent of the deportees were immigrants, Serrano shares that his mother was deported when he was just seven years old. Serrano also admits when he’s first presented onscreen that he’d never heard about the deportation until Greene came along, but he seems to grow more interested in the event the more he learns about it. Playing one of the striking miners, Serrano gives the best performance of all the reenactors—there’s a definite passion to his line readings and a poignantly understated dignity to his comportment. (He has a good singing voice too, as evidenced by his performances of some classic IWW songs.) He’s an ideal audience identification figure, as he overcomes his ignorance of history to become actively involved in historical recovery.
Directed by Robert Greene. In English and subtitled Spanish. Fri 10/5-Thu 10/11. PG, 113 min. Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, 773-871-6604, musicboxtheatre.com, $9 – $11.
