Sometimes the context in which one watches a movie makes a big difference in how one views it.  Last night I went to the house of one of my fellow CASAs in Washington County, Oregon, along with almost 20 other people to watch this movie.  All of us, as CASAs, bring a particular approach to a film like this, and our observations about the movie were broadly similar.  Many of us had known people not very unlike the teens in the documentary, and many of those who had kiddos who were teenagers had even known them to be in that spot, at a school that was the last chance to get a high school diploma.  I must admit that like many people I struggled in the film to see the people as bad kids.  To be sure, many of them were deeply unwise, but they did not strike me as particularly “bad,” at least in comparison with the youth population of the United States as a whole.  There are plenty of reasons why a teen might end up in an alternative program like the one shown in the movie, and not all of them are the fault of the children themselves.

Indeed, the movie itself was filmed over two years, and according to the filmmakers (who are also responsible for the classic “Lost In La Mancha”), the filmmakers spent a lot of time building trust with the people in the school.  The film does a good job at showing the course of time at a school, showing several character arcs, focusing on the principal, a passionate and positive woman who had her own challenging and difficult life history that seems to have given her a lot of compassion for others in the same boat.  We see some students in their complicated home lives, some who struggle with occasional homelessness, some with children–including a boyfriend and girlfriend who wrestle with his moodiness and her lack of confidence while trying to raise a son, even as he is thrown out of his house by his stepfather.  Nor is he the only person with unsupportive parents, as one of the brighter students, who graduates a year early, finds herself without her mother on her birthday and with a father who is angry at her for graduating early, as if that was a bad thing.  Still others find themselves wrestling with the aftermath of dysfunctional family backgrounds.

And it is this aspect of the movie that hit home the most for myself and others.  The kids in this movie not only struggle to make good choices and find a better life for themselves, but they come from generational patterns of failure.  Several of the children show obvious signs of having been abused or molested as children, most of them come from broken homes filled with divorce and abandonment, and many of them have parents that did drugs.  It is to be expected that these people would struggle with their own life decisions, seeing as most of them have not been loved very well nor has anyone in their lives set them good examples or thought highly of them at all before coming to the school in the movie, Black Rock, in the area around Joshua Tree and 29 Palms in the Mojave Desert of California.  One wonders if the children in the movie are aware that they cannot just leave where they came from and think that everything will be better.  We take ourselves wherever we go.  For me, and for many other people watching this movie, there are a lot of poignant scenes.  What will happen to the younger brother who idolizes his meth-using dropout older brother who cannot get his life together?  What will happen with the young woman who is afraid of growing up because adulting is hard?  How will the couple who struggle with moodiness and a lack of ambition deal with being parents so young?  This film leaves the viewer with a lot of questions and very few answers, but that is not too surprising given its contents, I suppose.