The Final Year (HBO)

The Final Year is a look at the final year of the Obama administration, focusing on three members of his foreign affairs team. It starts in an apartment early in the morning, as we watch UN Ambassador Samantha Power get ready for work and try to wrangle her children off to school. We then see Secretary of State John Kerry run back into his house to get the cell phone he left on the counter. For a movie that promises to take us behind the scenes of some of the most powerful people in the world, it all feels a little mundane.

That’s because Greg Barker’s look at the people in real power is actually about the mundane.

We get to view the President giving speeches and travelling around the globe, but for the people we are focused on — Power, Kerry, and Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes — the glitz can be few and far between. Instead, we get to follow them through cramped offices, bland hallways, long nights, and, in one case, seventy meetings in one day. We see politics on our TV screen as pomp and circumstance, but Barker wants to show us that there is a lot of grit and grime spent to get our leaders into those positions.

The great accomplishment of Barker’s film, though, is the candidness he is able to pull out of his subjects. At one point, Ben Rhodes prefaces his answer with “well, I guess it’ll be a while until this comes out,” and that seems to be the motto of the film. They know that this part of their public life is ending, and they seem open enough to speak a little truth to power. The Final Year is at its most fascinating when we get real, honest answers from people who often have to be guarded with their language and opinions when on camera. It brings out the humanity of each of these people, including President Obama in his visits with the camera.

Nowhere are these remarks more candid than in the final portion of the film, where the film must deal with the election of Donald Trump at the close of the Obama administration. The film doesn’t take a political side, but it allows its subjects to. They go through their jobs knowing that not only is their time coming to an end, but that what they have fought for is probably in jeopardy as a new administration with wildly different views is coming into power. The election night footage is difficult to watch because we have spent an hour and a half getting to know these figures who now see their life’s work rejected.

The film begins with them getting ready for a day of work, and it ends with them each packing their offices up, taking down pictures from the wall, and moving onto something new. As we watch Stephanie Power, who only earlier that day was one of the most powerful voices in the world, carry her own cardboard box of children’s drawings and family photos down the elevator to her car, we are reminded that power is fleeting and not always the most exciting of things to have.

The Rachel Divide (Netflix)

Rachel Dolezal became an instantly controversial figure in America when it was revealed that she, the leader of a local Washington NAACP chapter, defined herself as a being black when she was genetically white. The Rachel Divide is the new Netflix documentary that takes us through Dolezal’s attempt to get back on her feet. We meet her family, watch her try to deal with journalists who ask questions she considers too mean, and see her try to deal with it all by writing a memoir.

There is a lot to explore about Rachel Dolezal, but this film never really digs into it all. Director Laura Brownson is never able to get a real grasp on who Rachel Dolezal is because Dolezal never really comes clean about what is going on in her head. We don’t get to know her, nor do we understand what it means to her to “be black.” Maybe she doesn’t know, but we need to feel like the film does.

Brownson finally seems to take some sort of stand on the issue near the end, as we watch Dolezal legally change her name and the scene is underscored with a cover of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars.” That question, if there is truly life on another planet, feels as unknowable as the subject of the film Brownson is trying to get us to know.