‘The Librarians’ Review: A Powerful Documentary About American Book Bans — and the Heroes Who Battle Them
The banning of books in school libraries, an especially hot topic in 2022/23 news cycles, may not feature high in the headlines recently given the new presidential administration’s tsunami of rights-snuffing, Constitution-flouting executive orders. But it’s still going on. That makes the debut at Sundance of The Librarians, a scrupulously assembled feature documentary by esteemed, Peabody-winning director Kim A. Snyder, all the more welcome. (It’s extra timely given since Snyder was just Oscar-nominated, alongside producer Janique L. Robillard, for her documentary short Death By Numbers, which concerns a school-shooting survivor.)
Seamlessly assembling a wide variety of material, including vintage film snippets mixed in with the archival and original footage, The Librarians observes a clutch of educators, almost all women, fighting on the culture-war frontlines. Their opponents are legion: conservative school boards, members of the recently scandal-ridden right-wing organization Moms for Liberty and publicity-hungry Republican politicians, among others.
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Snyder seems to have started filming not long after Texas House Representative Matt Krause released his notorious list of 850 books that libraries should remove because they supposedly contained “obscene,” “pornographic” and “race-related” content. Books with positive attitudes toward LGBTQIA+ themes were especially vulnerable, and one student addressing a school board notes that roughly 60 percent of the 850 books would fall into this category. Fortunately, Krause’s lack of research didn’t catch all of them, as librarian Suzette Baker gleefully proves when she finds a copy of picture book A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, a tale of two male bunnies’ happy marriage, snuggled securely on the shelves in the children’s section — “where we keep our pornography,” Baker jests.
As clips of news reportage lays out incidents of the metastasizing censorship spreading across mostly “Red” states — although we do drop in on a fractious situation in New Jersey, too — Snyder gets boots on the ground to film local school board meetings where librarians, students, teachers and parents try to defend freedom of speech. Unfortunately, they’re all too often up against well-organized campaigns from the likes of Moms for Liberty, with their dark-money connections, who onboard a rogue’s gallery of speakers not just frothing at the mouth about the content of the books, but throwing around accusations against the librarians themselves.
Several of the latter recount how they were victimized by such campaigns and end up not just losing their jobs for daring to ask questions, but also are doxxed and targeted by fanatics. For instance, in Clay County, Florida, librarian Julie Miller, who is not only the daughter of a Baptist minister but the wife of one too, recounts how deranged Moms for Liberty zealot Bruce Friedman attacked her personally, especially after she tried to gently persuade him of the error of his ways following a meeting. At one point, Friedman writes that he will “run over” his opponents “like a dead body,” which is both macabre (who runs over dead bodies, Julie wonders) and somewhat grammatically confusing. Perhaps Friedman is likening himself to a dead body that runs the living over. It’s a puzzler.
While the big-picture issues at stake are never far from mind here, Snyder’s mini portraits of people caught up in this culture war are full of drama, especially among families. In Granbury, Texas, mother of nine Monica Brown crusades to repress LGBTQIA+ material in particular and tries to file criminal charges against librarians. A hard cut introduces us to her eldest son, Weston Brown, who now lives in San Diego with his male partner and has been cast out by Monica and the rest of the family, even banned from coming home for Thanksgiving. He bravely makes a trip to Granbury to speak at a school board meeting, supported by a feisty local friend, hairdresser Adrienne Quinn Martin, who forcefully denounces Monica — permanently armed with her cellphone recording video — as a fascist. It’s like an episode of Brian Jordan Alvarez’s sitcom English Teacher but in real life and tragic.
Meanwhile in Louisiana, award-winning librarian Amanda Jones finds herself estranged from her Christian Nationalist father — although it’s clear her mother is quietly siding with her brave daughter, who tried to fight back against her accusers by filing a defamation lawsuit, which she loses.
The parallels with McCarthyism are underlined not just by clips of Joe McCarthy himself and his own attacks on controversial books in the 1940s/50s, but by still-resonant film and TV clips, including cuts from The Twilight Zone’s dystopian episode “The Obsolete Man,” starring Burgess Meredith and relevant splices from Francois Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451. (Nicolas Roeg’s cinematography still glows.) Footage of Nazis burning books written by Jews and books sympathetic to LGBTQIA+ community members morphs seamlessly from the black-and-white 1930s newsreel into color, revealing a burning taking place merely years ago in Tennessee. Kudos are due to supervising editor Mark Becker and his team, who never put a splice wrong. That deft level of craft is maintained throughout, while the aching musical bed by contemporary composer Nico Muhly adds just the right tone of plangent despair tinged with hope.
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