Tower and Newtown (Netflix)

I often find myself, when watching a documentary, asking if I would rather be watching the dramatized version of the film. Does the reflection of the participants help the story, or would I rather be put in the moment of the story and watch it unfold for myself? Tower manages to do both in what must be one of the most powerful and tense documentaries to come out in years. It tells the story of the 1966 shooting at the University of Texas at Austin that led to 16 deaths and dozens of wounded victims. Director Keith Maitland isn’t satisfied merely telling us what happened in the horrifying hour-and-a-half on campus, however. He must show it to us also. So, as we hear the story of the people on the ground during the shooting, we watch rotoscoped animations of reenactments of the events, where live action is drawn over the photographed image to give it a not-quite-natural but still-very-real feeling to the violence. We are put right in the middle of the action, not looking back on a bygone event but watching it unfold in real time.

Maitland doesn’t stop there, though. He also rotoscopes over the storytellers so they appear to us not fifty years later but as their 1966 selves. These aren’t people reflecting on a horrid past — these are people telling us what is happening to them at this moment and flinging us into the chaos of a school shooting. And these people are who Maitland cares about the most: a pregnant woman playing opossum in the middle of the quad, a shopkeeper who finds himself running towards the violence instead of away from it, a woman who wants to do something but is too terrified to come out of hiding, and many more innocent people who become heroes in their own way. The name of the shooter himself is given only rarely, and his backstory is never touched on. He appears in the film only as a looming shadow perched high in a clock tower and he is never allowed to speak except by his gunshots that echo through the film. This is a film about the perseverance of victims and not the perversions of a killer. Who he is and why he is doing this is not what Tower is about; Tower is about a group of innocent people trying to survive when violence literally rains down upon them.

If the shooting at the University of Austin is the first major school shooting in modern American history, the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, which saw 20 elementary school students and 6 educators killed, is one of the most recent mass shootings to leave a permanent scar on our conscience. Like Tower, Kim A. Snyder’s documentary Newtown chooses to focus not on who committed a horrific crime but on the victims left to make sense of the crime itself. As one father says late in the film, he always found beauty in the chaos of the world, and the idea that everything happens from a seemingly random series of decisions; now, he is trying to find that beauty again when he sees what those decisions can lead to.

Unlike Tower, however, Newtown is more concerned with the aftermath of the event than the event itself. Early on, a Connecticut state trooper who was on the scene tells us that it is important for people to understand the shooting emotionally but that there is no need to tell the story graphically. Snyder makes good on this promise. She takes us on an emotional roller coaster from the community’s point of view and makes the town of Newtown the real center of the film. Newtown puts us in the shoes of grieving parents and shocked paramedics while letting them tell us only enough small details — the number of bullets in the young victims’ bodies, the remembrance of screaming children, the etched memory of a deceased seven-year-old cradled in his teacher’s arms — to let the act speak for itself.

It seems appropriate that Netflix has chosen to release both of these films on its platform weeks apart because taken together they are an emotionally draining yet essential portrait of an American epidemic. Near the end of Newtown, a grieving mother is talking to the father of a boy from her son’s class who survived. She tells him that someday, she wants his son to tell her what happened on that day and what her son’s final moments were like. Not yet, though. She isn’t ready. We also are probably not ready for a play-by-play recreation of Sandy Hook, either — Tower needs the distance of half a century to be able to tell that story in a way that doesn’t feel exploitative. Newtown, released less than four years after the shooting, does something that you can no longer do with the Austin story, however. It puts us in the immediacy of the aftermath, where the emotions are still raw and the town still feels like it is in a foggy daze. Taken together, these films paint a complete picture of what a real-life monster can wreak on innocent people.

Five Came Back (Netflix)

Five Came Back declares itself from the beginning as an important documentary. With a rousing score by Thomas Newman and narration by Meryl Streep, not to mention insight from Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo del Toro, Paul Greengrass, and Lawrence Kasdan, there is no questioning that director Laurent Bouzereau believes this story is of the utmost importance and should be handled that way. Based on Mark Harris’ nonfiction book of the same title, Five Came Back tells the story of five legendary Hollywood directors — Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, and William Wyler — who went to the front lines of World War II to create 13 documentaries showing the realities and horrors of war. Bouzereau smartly assigns one of these filmmakers to each director (Spielberg, for instance, always tells us about the experience of William Wyler). It makes the five journeys clear and, as they intertwine, never muddled. The sheer storytelling force of this film is remarkable.

Five Came Back is told in three hour-long parts, and the first part is certainly the weakest. It drips with prestige, reminding you at every turn how remarkable these five men were. At times it can feel almost like propaganda. As we move into the second, and especially third, parts, that propaganda fades into an honest look at what these men went through. The film finally admits flaws and the men feel less like great heroes and more like honest artists struggling through a world they didn’t expect to encounter. The film is almost always at its best when it lets the documentaries within the documentary speak for themselves. As the footage they were capturing became more urgent, moving us from distant air battles to D-Day and finally into the concentration camps, the film becomes less heightened. Five Came Back mirrors the mood of the filmmakers it is capturing as their mindset becomes less about promoting America and more about documenting horror. What started as hero-building becomes hero-acknowledging, letting the work of these film masters linger in our memory the same way that it lingered in their memory, for good or bad.