Centered on what is becoming an all-too-familiar theme in American documentaries these days, The Disrupted nobly pursues its goal of chronicling the ever-shrinking middle class and wealth disparity. The film focuses on the increasing financial and occupational hardships faced by a handful of middle-American families whose livelihoods have been pushed to the brink by increasing corporate greed. Through this microcosmic lens, co-directors Sarah Colt and Josh Gleason effectively interweave the often heartbreaking, sometimes maddening stories of three everyday working people and their families, all barely clinging to the cusp of a middle-class existence in heartland American towns.
One of the film’s subjects, Uber and Lyft driver Cheryl, for years made a good living with greedy hipster ride-hailing companies: now she’s seeing her rates plummet as Uber and Lyft make record profits. These days, to earn a living she’s forced to work full time as a driver while trying to run a small business peddling anti-aging cream. Donn, a hardened 62-year-old Kansan farmer is seeing prices from cattle and crops drop precipitously and finds himself having to borrow more and more money from the government while parceling out and selling off sections of his own farmland to avoid going under. (Worse, Donn admits that he’s talked more than one fellow agricultural worker out of committing suicide.) And then there’s Junior, who grew up in the projects in Ohio and spent time incarcerated for dealing crack.
He’d carved out a modest but workable slice of the American Dream for himself, with a $23 per hour factory job at the local 3M plant and had managed to raise a family and pay off a mortgage in his 11 years spent at the company. Then the 3M plant closed, and Junior is left flailing in a post-manufacturing economy where he has to retrain for an unfamiliar kind of work, all while trying to keep his anxiety-ridden family together. The Disrupted manages to cover a wide swath of economic hardship in a country where corporate disaster capitalist practices and patriotic laissez faire philosophy have created a divided nation in which, as we learn, 40 percent of American families don’t even have as much as $400 in emergency savings. This is a eye-opening and often despairing look at the absurd lengths the underprivileged in America have to go to just to eke out a marginal existence in the richest country in the world. Recommended. Aud: C, P.