Documentary films are just like the essays you have to turn into school. The audience is your teacher, grading whether or not the filmmaker made his points effective or not and that it is a concise argument. I bring this up, because the greatest irony is that Waiting for Superman doesn't get a passing grade. Or perhaps, that proves its case.
For anyone who has seen the news lately (or watched Season Four of The Wire) knows that the education system in American is in trouble. There is too much emphasis on teaching the test, students are falling behind, and the teachers’ union makes it impossible to fire bad teachers. It’s a very serious subject that Davis Guggenheim doesn’t give enough respect towards.
Guggenheim is best known in the documentary world for his Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth and It Might Get Loud. Here he attributes too many of the same mistakes from the former in an attempt for empathy. There are two documentaries going on within the film, neither of which has the proper focus it requires. There is one trying to be the simpler Hoop Dreams as it examines a few adorable children trying to get into a charter school. I never felt I really understood how the children approach their educational situation because everything felt artificial. Nothing was “captured.” I always felt the presence of the camera affecting what they were saying.
The other half of the documentary was tackling the problem from at a systematic level. Guggenheim talks with Geoffrey Canada and Michelle Rhee, who are very engaging people but they are that way in spite of the movie. They know how to pitch their propositions but Guggenheim can’t string them together into a compelling case. He can’t let the facts speak for themselves; he needs to have animated sequences, which add nothing and out of context film clips like School of Rock. Those sorts of devices work in a film like Super Size Me because that is a different tone.
Too many things would have been marked with a red pen. There’s too much dead weight with the film like the narration and random tangents like looking at the “rubber rooms.” When the film is all over the place like this, it is cheapened with its emotions and academic comprehension. Waiting for Superman is too simple when dealing with a complex problem. This is being seen as the definitive film of the topic because of its high distribution, but it deserves a better approach.