A danger of making any documentary about legal challenges to the Trump administration is that the news cycle will have moved on by the time the movie opens. At the beginning of “The Fight,” Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who specializes in immigration rights, praises a federal judge’s January 2017 ruling partly blocking the president’s travel ban. “The president could not override the courts,” Gelernt says of the decision. Three and a half years later, his words sound almost quaint.
Now, with the A.C.L.U. facing off with federal agents in Portland, Ore., “The Fight” offers an almost retro look at four of the organization’s legal fights from the past few years. The cases concern the separation of immigrants from their children; the abortion rights of an undocumented teenager; whether the federal government would be permitted to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census; and the administration’s ban on the participation of most transgender people in the military.
There is no question that the directors, Elyse Steinberg, Josh Kriegman and Eli Despres, have a fondness for the A.C.LU. and share many of its goals. Nevertheless, the movie is concerned not with simple boosterism but with showing the inner workings of building a case: how potential clients are identified, what arguments get made, how lawyers prepare for court appearances and how arcane matters of law affect real lives.
Although the focus is on the lawyers, we meet some of their clients. In Tijuana, Gelernt interviews a Guatemalan asylum seeker who describes being separated from his son after arriving at the United States border. Joshua Block and Chase Strangio confer with Brock Stone, a longtime transgender officer in the Navy.
“The Fight” briefly acknowledges that the A.C.L.U. has also defended less sympathetic clients. Jeffery Robinson, a deputy legal director, says there were tough discussions within the organization after the violence in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, when the A.C.L.U. had pressed in court that the white nationalists had a right to rally. On other matters, lawyers read aloud their hate mail and play nasty voice mail messages for the camera.
If the filmmakers succeed in wringing drama from decisions that have already come down, their efforts at character development are hit-and-miss. Showing people struggling with everyday technology has become an inane documentary motif, and Gelernt’s apparently chronic difficulties with keeping his cellphone charged add more cutesiness than texture. On the other hand, it is bracing to hear audio of Brigitte Amiri, a lawyer who works on reproductive-rights cases, parrying with then-Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh when she argued before him at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. It is especially invigorating to watch Dale Ho prepare to present the census case to the Supreme Court. It’s the first case he has argued there, he says, and an opportunity he didn’t expect.
The directors film Ho in a hotel room practicing his opening remarks in front of a mirror and flubbing them, hoping he won’t do so the next day. (He didn’t.) Later, when the court rules, we watch him reading the complicated decision at the same time the rest of country does, and his dawning realization — after initially thinking he has lost — that he won.
The Fight
Rated PG-13. Images of detention centers. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Rent or buy on Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
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