Some Movies Actually Understand Poverty in America - The New York Times

The complex realities of subsistence escape “Hillbilly Elegy.” But as far back as Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights,” filmmakers have been turning a discerning eye on destitution.

Depicting the complex realities of poverty — not just its hollowed-out emptiness but attendant emotions of shame and despair — has always been tricky.

Italy has its earthy tradition of neorealism, bringing us midcentury heartbreakers like “Bicycle Thieves” and “Umberto D.” In India, Satyajit Ray made the humane miniatures of his 1950s Apu Trilogy, set just a hair’s breadth away from destitution.

But with millions more Americans closer to poverty than there were a year ago and the food lines snaking to the horizon, maybe we should get better at addressing it.

Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights” (1931) is a comedy vibrating with economic anxiety.

(By extension, do we?) The fade to black on Chaplin’s quivering face is both hopeful and a touch uncertain.

The critic James Agee called it the “highest moment in movies.” But the studios, by and large, didn’t follow Chaplin’s lead.

(The Times critic A.O. Scott celebrated the film as a piece of homegrown “neo-neorealism.”).

In the forthcoming “Nomadland” (a critical sensation at the fall film festivals), Frances McDormand disappears into the role of Fern, a hardened widow living in her van and traveling from job to job after her Nevada factory town collapses.

McDormand and the director Chloé Zhao improvised and shot their project with real van-dwelling nomads.

Finding a strain of autonomy or boldness is crucial in elevating a film about poverty — even a modestly budgeted one — from seeming condescending.