Gwen’s Take: When movies are more than reality

I live in a just-the-facts world professionally, where political professionals spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to sell themselves as authentic, only to realize that such a thing cannot be sold.

So it’s refreshing to go to the movies and allow myself to sink into someone else’s fairy tale or into a different vision of history.

I do this not expecting to leave the theater believing that every relationship ends with happily ever after, or that Meryl Streep is either a lonely Iowa housewife or a scary witch. I go to the movies mostly to escape.

Apparently this approach is now fraught with peril. Going to see a film lately has become a political act.

If you like Bradley Cooper with a gun in his hand, you are a conservative. If you enjoy watching David Oyelowo spar with Tom Wilkinson in a faux Oval Office, you must be liberal. Heaven knows what it means if you enjoyed both “American Sniper” and “Selma.”

True documentaries do not provide the same challenge. Interpretation happens mostly in your own head. So I felt privileged to get the chance to see two extraordinary ones during a quick visit this week to the Sundance Film Festival.

“How to Dance in Ohio,” a film by Alexandra Shiva, takes you inside the world of autism — but through the eyes of autistic teens preparing for a formal dance. The camera mostly follows three risk averse, shy girls with varying degrees of verbal and social skills as they navigate all of the horrors of young adulthood — parents, boys, shopping, learning to dance — but with the grace that comes with overcoming.

Their psychologist urges them to relate to one another by climbing out onto emotional limbs most of us routinely avoid.

“I found we could all relate to this in some ways,” Shiva told the Park Record (Park City, Utah). “There isn’t anyone who, in some point in their lives, hasn’t had those types of difficulties. The only difference is that they are magnified for these girls.”

At the screening I attended, virtually every member of the audience was grinning when the lights came up.

The second film I saw was gripping in an entirely different way. “Cartel Land” takes us inside the conflict underway on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Co-director and cinematographer Matthew Heineman follows two self-described vigilantes in Arizona and in the Mexican state of Michoácan as they take law enforcement into their own hands. The American protagonist is determined to enforce border security by stopping the men shepherding immigrants across the border illegally. The Mexican protagonist creates his own armed movement to root out the cartels that finance and profit from it.

The film begins and ends deep in the woods at night, as masked men cook the crystal meth that will be shipped to the U.S. in order to finance the cartels. In between, we see shootouts, a torture chamber and intimate family moments that capture both the chaos and the shades of gray that drive the crisis on both sides of the Rio Grande.

It’s very real, very gripping, and makes political debates about immigration and border security seem very shockingly beside the point.

At the question and answer sessions that followed each screening, no one asked the filmmakers about their political views. It hardly mattered.

That’s because Shiva and Heineman make documentaries that are about real reality, not “inspired by” reality. Even when they set out with a point of view, each said what unfolded before their lenses invariably changed the story they thought they were there to tell.

To turn either film into a political argument would only expose a truth that does not lend itself to the kind of debate that plays out so well on cable shows.

They remind us that the most compelling and important stories we can tell play out in complicated, many-hued shades of gray.

The absolutes of right and wrong are better left to fiction. And to Washington politics.