Doc Corner: The Compelling 'Roll Red Roll'

By Glenn Dunks

“She is so raped right now… this is the funniest thing ever.”

That’s one of the callous lines that opens Nancy Schwartzman’s debut feature documentary, Roll Red Roll. Played against misty images of an otherwise seemingly peaceful hamlet, the opening minute is not the last time we will hear those words, spoken as they were by a male high schooler as a young girl lay drunken and unconscious on the floor of his friend’s rec room. The words return later, this time in video form, as the boy in question laughs and smiles, his face radiating with some sort of queasy pride for his friends, two fellow high schooler students who would eventually be found guilty of rape.

It’s important to not beat around the bush here – after all, Schwartzman’s film doesn’t...

This is a film about a hideous crime, true; one that was investigated, tried and ultimately brought to, if nothing else, a legal conclusion. What the film is also about, more importantly in fact, is the world that swirled around it. The efforts put to downplay the boys’ actions as “boys will be boys” larrikinism, the whisper campaigns and slut-shaming of the victim, the cover-up of a town’s star athletes, and the painfully shameless lack of empathy and grossly misogynistic attitudes of the young men who perpetrated the crime, their friends who allowed it to happen, and the townspeople who forgave it.

The case at the centre of Roll Red Roll is actually a well-documented one. At least as these things go. Based in the Ohio city of Steubenville where the locals are so mad about football their stadium features a mascot that actually shoots fire. When details of a Jane Doe rape case began to emerge, little attention was paid. It wasn’t until a local true crime blogger sleuthed her way through the social media profiles of the local high school’s varsity football squad that people sat up and took the case seriously. But when notorious hacktivist collective Anonymous (they’re the ones in the V for Vendetta masks) gave it their stamp of authority that the country’s broader media took notice, resulting in protests and allowed for a community to at least begin to come to terms with the affects of its devout athletic hero worship across generations and the putrid behavior that has been instilled in its male population, young and old, as a result.

Collated with finesse in a flurry of on-screen texts, tweets and Instagram shots that is remarkably compelling thanks in large part to editors Erin Casper, Mitch Jacobson and Christopher White as well as music supervision by Mary Ramos who fuses traditional score with bro metal music to dazzling effect. Clocking in at just 80 minutes (thank you – this did not need to be a six-part miniseries!), it tells the Steubenville story with clarity and refreshing succinctness while eschewing the cult of personality too often found in expanded doc-miniseries of late.

The film, of course, comes on the heels of the Brett Cavanaugh hearings, and the rhetoric has not changed (although he is never named nor inferred in Steubenville’s story). Schwartzman gets great drama out of the town locals including a radio DJ known as DJ Bloomdaddy (I mean, come on) who says things that are repugnant and yet entirely representative of large swathes of people. There’s more accountability in a way as demonstrated through the detailed way social media has a major effect on the outcomes of the case, but a cursory glance online suggests the two young men, Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, who do not feature beyond yearbook photos, the icon besides their phone records and texts and video of their apologies, have carried on with their lives as has the town. Big Red pride and all that.

Given her access, it would have been good for Schwartzman to go beyond the boys’ convictions and interrogate into the reverberations of the case. What became of those involved and how did the town change, if it did so at all. Especially considering so many women came forward to recall their own stories of rape and assault. No word is made of how a Steubenville judge (not one involved with the Jane Doe case) was shot five years later outside his courtroom by the father of one of the boys who were sent to prison for a year in 2012 (the man was himself shot and killed). It’s also probably worth noting that as of March this year, it appears Mays has been accused once more of sexual assault at his college.

Schwartzman does not editorialize the material. Many will have strong reactions to the subject matter, but it’s worth noting that the filmmaker herself has not let her film be distracted by anything other than the facts and what is on record whether it be in a courthouse file cabinet of a radio talk show recording. Still, while the film ends with the boys’ conviction, it can’t help but do so with an air of sadness that doesn’t gloss over the fact that while justice may have been served here to some degree, more often than not it does not.

Release: Currently screening in NY and opening in LA this week. It is also screening at a whole host of festivals and event sessions across the country that are detailed here.

Oscar Chances: It's topical so that helps. If it manages to pick up some broader attention then I'd say it could rise higher up the estimations. If Netflix were to come on board later in the year then it could be a strong contender. It's really hard to say.