Short Takes

Reviewed: ‘Deaf President Now!’ and ‘The Assessment’

‘Deaf President Now!’ (2025)

Davis Guggenheim has long aimed his lens on social issues and humans of interest, be it his Oscar-winning climate change contemplation “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006), “He Named Me Malala” (2015) or “Waiting for Superman” (2010), which took on the failures of the education system. Here, with co-director Nyle DeMarco, the first Deaf contestant to win “Dancing with the Stars” and “America’s Next Top Model,” Guggenheim homes in on a small moment of American civil disobedience that, in context, reflects larger equity issues. The time is the big ’80s, the place, Gallaudet University, the only Deaf university in the world. Founded as a result of an executive order by Abraham Lincoln in 1864 (one we can all get behind), Gallaudet had never had a Deaf president; when it was announced that two of the three candidates to take on the role in 1988 were Deaf, there was much hope and excitement among students. The trustees, none of whom were Deaf or hearing impaired, picked the lone hearing candidate, Elisabeth Zinzer. The students immediately rejected Zinzer and locked down the campus. For the framing, Guggenheim and DeMarco find the four leaders of the protest – the reserved Tim, the passionately demonstrative Jerry, the quiet and demurring Greg and fiery Bridgetta – to reflect back. One of the most intriguing aspects of the protest is how the student negotiator to the trustees was selected: Jerry, who in flashbacks clearly has the innate ability to rouse a crowd, believed he should have been the one, but it was Greg, who, while reserved, was student body president. His showdown on “Nightline” with Zinzer, which nearly gets thrown by host-mediator Ted Koppel doing his Ted Koppel thing, is telling on many levels. The lockdown also had pundits and politicians such as Pat Buchanan and Barney Frank at odds and in an uproar. One of the most inflaming inflection points however, was the insistence by Zinzer and the head of the board, an out-of-touch matron with an impeccable bouffant by the name of Jane Bassett Spilman, that they were simply trying to “help” the students. As with Guggenheim’s other delves, “Deaf President Now!” is composed meticulously. There’s a virtuosic blending of interviews with archival footage and smart dramatizations that aptly employ sensory deprivation to put you in the moment. The Gallaudet uprising came two years before the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law by the administration of Bush senior. The roots of that law is well framed in the small, little seen 2007 Ron Livingston film “Music Within,” which would make an ideal viewing companion with “Deaf President Now!”

‘The Assessment’ (2024)

Music videographer Fleur Fortuné makes their big screen debut with this dystopian sci-fi psycho-thriller in which, in the near future, the process of having a baby is something of a Navy Seal boot camp and harder to achieve than getting into Harvard. Like in “Another Earth” (2011), universe-shaping changes are rendered through a small lens. In this case, the planet has become essentially uninhabitable, most of the planet’s fauna and flora are extinct and the haves live in a domed Eden while the have-notslive outside in dust-choked tenement buildings. Living fairly poshly in a technologically advanced home by the sea are Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel), a married couple working on the world problems du jour – Mia’s a botanist trying to cultivate plant life, while Aaryan designs virtual reality pets to replace extinct animals. Given their contributions to society, it should be no big deal to score a lotto ticket for having a kid (which are artificially produced in this futurescape). Not so. To qualify for a child, you have to undergo a seven-day trial by an assessor, in this case a handmaid-attired marm by the name of Virginia (Alicia Vikander, not far off from her calm and calculating AI persona in “Ex Machina”). First there’s the sampling of blood, semen, vaginal secretions and saliva, and Virginia must oversee all firsthand – even the couple in coitus. Then to see if the couple have good parenting mettle, Virginia adapts the persona of a terrible 2-year old, flinging gruel into Aaryan and Mia’s faces. Natch, over the seven days, the psychological (and sexual) antics ratchet up to the near breaking point. The cast is all in and makes the frustration and frayed emotions tangible; the weak link is the lack of credible world building and some overwrought mind games.