Reviews

This film needs to be seen by as wide an audience as possible. In telling the tale of Gabby's life, the shocking shooting in Tucson and of her recovery, it also manages to address other troubling issues that are confronting this country in our time - the epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings, the bitter partisan divide over firearms, and it even touches on the unaffordability of health care for Americans when they find themselves at the most vulnerable time in their lives.

Sadly, the film could not be more timely. At a certain point, the grim count of mass shootings since 2011 is recited. I and my friend were reduced to tears as the seemingly endless parade of high body count tragedies went on and on: Aurora, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Orlando, Las Vegas, Stoneman Douglas HS, El Paso, Boulder. I am right now looking at the Wikipedia page that lists mass shootings and I am certain I am forgetting others (how sad is that???) that were likely mentioned as well, such as the Sutherland Springs church shooting in 2017 that killed 26 and injured 22.

It is July 2022 as I write this; I broke down completely when they finished this macabre count because there have now been three mass shootings in 2022 that apparently occurred too late in post-production to be included: Buffalo, Highland Park, Uvalde. All of the shootings that I just listed resulted in 276 deaths and 1151 (!!!) wounded. In just two of those shootings (Sandy Hook and Uvalde), 48 children were literally blown to pieces by a madman with a weapon of mass murder.

This does not happen in any other country that is not fighting a war on its own soil. This happens in America, not in Ukraine. Take all the time you need with that one.

This film is not just about gun violence, however. It also gives us the fascinating and inspiring inside story of Gabby's long road to recovery from a head wound that by all rights should have left her dead or in a vegetative state. I was tempted to call her survival and recovery miraculous, but that adjective does not give anywhere nearly enough credit to the hard work and dedication that was required of Gabby and her doctors and therapists. I'm so glad that somebody (Mark Kelly perhaps?) had the insight to film this process from the early days onward with a professional cameraman.

We also learn about she came to be married to Mark Kelly, and how the shooting unalterably changed the course of their lives. Of course we know how it cut short Gabby's career in politics; I never knew that she and Mark had wanted to have children and that she was scheduled to undergo IVF treatment on Monday, 1/10/2011. The shooting occurred on January 8th. Their dream of having children together, of course, was also cut short that day. (I cried while writing those last three sentences, just as I did at that point in the film.)

Gabby also had a goal of running for Senate one day; the shooting inspired Mark Kelly to continue her work and fulfill her dream by running for Senate. Of course I knew that he had a career as an astronaut; what I did not know was that he had never considered a career in politics until his wife was shot. I just assumed that he had always intended to enter politics after his NASA career ended.

Finally, this film also speaks to how we can come together to find ways to talk to each other about difficult and very partisan topics such as gun violence, rather than bashing each other over the head with talking points and bickering past one another. Both of those are works in progress; there's no happy ending in this film for either of those topics but it does point us in the direction that we need to head if there's any hope of moving past simply seeking to score partisan political points against 'the other side'.

I am a professional in the production business (television, not filmmaking) and I can attest that the filmmakers did a masterful job of interweaving these threads into a moving and hopeful tapestry that will inspire all but the coldest hearts to be the change we want to see in the world. Let's sit down and talk to one another, America. Let's drop the talking points and truly see and hear each other with compassion and kindness and find a way to move forward so that everyone who likes and needs their firearms can have them while we put an end to this senseless, frighteningly normalized American ritual of mass slaughter followed by little other than thoughts and prayers.

Knowing going in that this isn't going to be some sort of Spike Lee opus, I was ready for anything.

5 min in, I was ready to quit due to the opening scene where Priest calmly and rationally talks a rap star who owes him money - that he's just humiliated in front of everyone attending a party he's throwing - out of having his entourage kill him. It was absolutely ludicrous. No tension at all and the rap musician actually adopts a look like that of a five year old that just got scolded by his mom. And this is supposed to set up how Priest is this badass that everyone fears more than all the other drug lords? OK, whatever.

I kept with it, it got better but it was still very hard to believe how Priest was so feared by other truly badasses, including the leader of the Snow Crew. There's nothing gritty about him and his very nice, fresh-from-the-salon haircut. He just seems like a nice guy; drug dealers are not nice people even if they are nice to their pets and children.

There are some nice touches like the crooked cops and the guy whose car loses control and destroys a Confederate monument.

It's not as bad as some here have said, but it's also not anything you'll remember much 15 minutes after it's over.

While I enjoyed seeing this true story dramatized, there was much that detracted from it. Sandra Grimes is portrayed as nearly the only one who 'gets it' (save Jeanne Vertefeuille, who is cast as a definite second banana and is only slightly less clueless than Grimes' colleagues). She's portrayed as 100% infallible. In contrast, her colleagues are absolutely clueless and dismissive of her every instinct and suggestion. (By episode 7, I was laughing out loud at how ridiculous this contrast had become.) There is absolutely no subtlety about it; she's right, and everyone else is wrong! Instead of dialogue and debate, they just blow her off. Around episode 6 or 7, Ames becomes her #1 suspect. Why? We have no idea; he just is. The lame attempts to create some sort of domestic drama and conflict fall especially flat, a not even half-hearted attempt to portray the stress on a couple where one of the spouses can't talk about her job at all. Rosario Ames - whose expensive tastes and free spending were the prime motivation for her husband's treason - is hardly seen until late in the series and she's barely a one-dimensional character. The sappy AF ending - when Grimes and Vertefeuille share a hug after signing their book for the granddaughter of one of Ames' victims - had me rolling my eyes all the way back in my head. To paraphrase how another reviewer put it, this is like Lifetime getting their hands on a Le Carre spy novel.

In short the portrayal of Grimes is the sort of hagiography a narcissist would indulge in, and attempt to pass off as the 'true version' of events. "Everybody around me was an idiot, I was the only one who 'got it' and I was never wrong."

The series is not without its moments. All of the actors portraying Russians are good to excellent. In particular, episode 6 is by far the most compelling, contrasting the interrogation of a Russian general (Peter Guinness) betrayed by Ames with the high-stakes lie detector test that Ames undergoes. The KGB general interrogating Polyakov is Nicholas Woodeson, a dead ringer for Armin Mueller-Stahl ("Eastern Promises"). In fact, I highly recommend following up viewing this series by reading about the key characters involved. In particular, General Polyakov was one of the most important double agents ever in the history of spying; the list of Soviet secrets he gave up is astounding. For instance, the intelligence he provided on Soviet anti-tank missiles was important to the coalition effort in the 1990 Gulf War. Intelligence provided by Polyakov on the estrangement of China from the USSR played a key role in Nixon's decision to open diplomatic relations with China.

This could have (and should have) been made into a feature film; I'm confident that a much better job could have been done in a 2 hour long feature than this series does in 8.