Adroitly timed to tie in with the American election, Totally Under Control is a kind of report card for the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus, and the grade is a big, fat F. Filmmakers Alex Gibney, Suzanne Hillinger and Ophelia Harutyunyan’s film is clearly not meant to be a definitive overview; instead the aim is to simply take the temperature of America’s response during the early days of the pandemic. The details and acronyms (CDC, AMA, FEMA) come thick and fast, bordering on exhausting, but it is a compelling snapshot of a major fuck-up, and a rallying cry to not repeat the same mistakes again.
To make the pre-election release date, Gibney, who has tackled such equally hot-button topics as Enron, Scientology and Catholic priests, enlisted filmmakers Hillinger and Harutyunyan to spread the workload, coming up with ingenious ways to shoot the movie safely under the cloud of Covid. This included sending interview subjects sterilised camera equipment so they could be their own cinematographer, video conference interviews, and filming behind elaborate, plastic-wrapped barriers as participants, a mixture of insiders, journalists, experts and whistle-blowers, tell their stories straight down the barrel of the lens. The approach not only suggests the filmmakers are taking the safety aspects far more seriously than the President, it also gives you the sense this is absolutely a dispatch from the frontline of a disaster.
It is truly frightening.
Totally Under Control — the title comes from an offhand remark made by Trump — details a battle between science and politics, public safety and private business. It starts with a compare-and-contrast of Trump’s handling of the virus with that of South Korea, which logged its first Covid case on the same day as the US (spoiler: South Korea — 354 deaths; USA —200,000 and counting). From here the film investigates the crisis from a myriad angles, from the struggles of the medical community to be taken seriously to the dismantling of the Obama-created Global Health Security team, from the shortages in PPE and subsequent battles between states to secure supplies to the handing over of the crisis from medical experts to entrepreneurs. Max Kennedy Jr, grandson of Robert Kennedy, joined Jared Kushner’s supply-chain taskforce as a volunteer, only to find himself rudderless amongst a bunch of twentysomethings trying to figure out themselves how government procurement of medical supplies worked. It is truly frightening.
We are bombarded with stats (20 per cent of the world’s coronavirus death toll comes from the US, although it only comprises 4.25 per cent of the global population), a litany of unbelievable Trump moments (his misguided devotion to hydroxychloroquine, his refusal to wear a mask in a sanitised mask factory while the PA system plays ‘Live And Let Die’), and some genuine discoveries (an email chain dubbed ‘Red Dawn’ sent from medical officers to Trump’s staff). It’s a tribute to Gibney’s skill that he can weave all of this into a coherent, often gripping narrative, illustrating his argument with (mostly Fox) news clips, powerful shots of empty streets and a bit of CG whizzery that tracks and traces the invisible virus from person to person.
The film is angry but level-headed, the Trump-bashing done mostly by judicious choice of clips rather than talking heads spilling invective. The film has a closing title card that announces it was completed on the day Trump announced he’d contracted Covid-19. Juxtaposed with his admission to journalist Bob Woodward that he knew all along how dangerous the virus was, Totally Under Control comes to a simple but depressing conclusion: the catastrophe could have been so easily avoided.