TOTALLY UNDER CONTROL
****
Directors: Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger
Principal cast:
Donald J. Trump
Kathleen Sebelius
Taison Bell
Rick Bright
Scott Becker
Francis Riedo
Country: USA
Classification: CTC
Runtime: 124 mins.
Australian release date: Streaming on Apple TV from 13 October 2020.
When the ‘Leader of the Free World’, President Donald J. Trump, declared earlier this year that the current COVID-19 pandemic was the first in history, it was enough to make one cringe because this was definitely fake news and not to be taken seriously – except, of course, if you were completely ignorant of the 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ outbreak that killed somewhere between 17 and 50 million individuals in the aftermath of WWI. Trump’s pronouncement gave an indication of just how totally unprepared the White House was to cope with this deadly virus. Yes, occasionally ignorance is bliss, but not when peoples’ lives are at risk from a disease that spreads with ease and a president with little knowledge about how to deal with it. The result is over 220,000 fatalities in the USA (at the time of writing), all under the watch of a leader who has “expressed incredible disdain for science”, according to an interviewee in Totally Under Control.
This new documentary from Oscar-winner Alex Gibney, co-directing with Suzanne Hillinger and Ophelia Harutyunyan, lays out just how this disaster unfolded. It covers ground that anyone with knowledge of the subject would already be familiar with, but seen from Day One to the day before Trump declared that he, too, had caught the novel Coronavirus, it’s devastating. It reveals a litany of errors and tardiness. On 20 January 2020, the USA announced its first positive case which, incidentally, was also the day that South Korea confirmed its first case. The film proceeds to point out the vast difference in the way that these two countries dealt with the problem (to date, South Korea has lost eight citizens per million to the disease, the USA 664). Since that day, through interviews with a White House press correspondent, various health experts and doctors, infectious disease specialists, the ex-director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and a former Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Totally Under Control tells us that the knowledge was available to manage the pandemic in a responsible, mature way but the Trump administration totally mishandled the treatment of the virus. Right from the start, the distribution of testing kits and Personal Protective Equipment was bungled, and misleading and erroneous information (Hydroxychloroquine anyone?) was issued to the population. And, we learn, that virtually all of these stuff-ups led directly to the White House.
Gibney says that he started Totally Under Control only six months ago, so the film is an amazing achievement. He “started this project when I was just so outraged by the federal response. It was April. We were in the middle of the New York shit show”. Wanting to get the documentary to air before the presidential election led him to use his two fellow directors, because the amount of research needed and the number of interviews to be conducted required that the trio work independently to a large degree in order to cover all the bases. While this was going on, four editors were involved in assembling their footage as it came in. Hillinger explains that, “we were in production and in edit basically at the same time from the very beginning of the project - it ended up being a brain meld where we were all writing interview questions together, all doing research. It was all hands on deck from the very beginning and ended up being very collaborative”.
The result is shocking and will make you glad you live in Australia, Melbourne second wave notwithstanding. We do not normally review work made to go straight to streaming, rather than the cinema, but Totally Under Control is so compelling that we are happy to make an exception. The information is densely compiled and will reward those who pay close attention. See it if you can.
Principal cast:
Donald J. Trump
Kathleen Sebelius
Taison Bell
Rick Bright
Scott Becker
Francis Riedo
Country: USA
Classification: CTC
Runtime: 124 mins.
Australian release date: Streaming on Apple TV from 13 October 2020.
When the ‘Leader of the Free World’, President Donald J. Trump, declared earlier this year that the current COVID-19 pandemic was the first in history, it was enough to make one cringe because this was definitely fake news and not to be taken seriously – except, of course, if you were completely ignorant of the 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ outbreak that killed somewhere between 17 and 50 million individuals in the aftermath of WWI. Trump’s pronouncement gave an indication of just how totally unprepared the White House was to cope with this deadly virus. Yes, occasionally ignorance is bliss, but not when peoples’ lives are at risk from a disease that spreads with ease and a president with little knowledge about how to deal with it. The result is over 220,000 fatalities in the USA (at the time of writing), all under the watch of a leader who has “expressed incredible disdain for science”, according to an interviewee in Totally Under Control.
This new documentary from Oscar-winner Alex Gibney, co-directing with Suzanne Hillinger and Ophelia Harutyunyan, lays out just how this disaster unfolded. It covers ground that anyone with knowledge of the subject would already be familiar with, but seen from Day One to the day before Trump declared that he, too, had caught the novel Coronavirus, it’s devastating. It reveals a litany of errors and tardiness. On 20 January 2020, the USA announced its first positive case which, incidentally, was also the day that South Korea confirmed its first case. The film proceeds to point out the vast difference in the way that these two countries dealt with the problem (to date, South Korea has lost eight citizens per million to the disease, the USA 664). Since that day, through interviews with a White House press correspondent, various health experts and doctors, infectious disease specialists, the ex-director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and a former Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Totally Under Control tells us that the knowledge was available to manage the pandemic in a responsible, mature way but the Trump administration totally mishandled the treatment of the virus. Right from the start, the distribution of testing kits and Personal Protective Equipment was bungled, and misleading and erroneous information (Hydroxychloroquine anyone?) was issued to the population. And, we learn, that virtually all of these stuff-ups led directly to the White House.
Gibney says that he started Totally Under Control only six months ago, so the film is an amazing achievement. He “started this project when I was just so outraged by the federal response. It was April. We were in the middle of the New York shit show”. Wanting to get the documentary to air before the presidential election led him to use his two fellow directors, because the amount of research needed and the number of interviews to be conducted required that the trio work independently to a large degree in order to cover all the bases. While this was going on, four editors were involved in assembling their footage as it came in. Hillinger explains that, “we were in production and in edit basically at the same time from the very beginning of the project - it ended up being a brain meld where we were all writing interview questions together, all doing research. It was all hands on deck from the very beginning and ended up being very collaborative”.
The result is shocking and will make you glad you live in Australia, Melbourne second wave notwithstanding. We do not normally review work made to go straight to streaming, rather than the cinema, but Totally Under Control is so compelling that we are happy to make an exception. The information is densely compiled and will reward those who pay close attention. See it if you can.