***½/****
directed by Albert Maysles
by Walter Chaw Following four generations of women from LaLee Wallace's destitute family in the heart of the Mississippi delta's cotton country, legendary documentarian Albert Maysles's LaLee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton is full of the quiet tragedy of being human. Poetic and demanding, it very subtly changes you as you watch it, shaming us for our petty concerns in the face of what LaLee bears on a daily basis. Entire African-American generations are ruined in the cotton country of the fertile Mississippi delta crescent–a cycle of illiteracy and poverty unexpectedly precipitated by the transition of the cotton industry from hand to machine. The documentary follows one of LaLee's grandchildren ("Granny") and one of her great-grandchildren ("Main") as they struggle to conjure up the pennies needed to purchase the paper and pencils that will gain them entrance into school. It simultaneously details the trials of that school as it tries to raise its Iowa Aptitude Exam Scores to a minimum standard, thus preventing the government from perhaps imposing a system that is unsympathetic to the plight of the locals.
Adorned with subtitles to cut through the deep Mississippi dialect, LaLee's Kin is an almost unbearable chronicle of what happens when people are trapped in educational and economic prisons. It's hard to imagine a clearer illustration of the factors that lead to privation, and it's difficult to digest that there are places in the United States resembling a third-world slum. Maysles's gift is to involve his audience utterly in the lives of his subjects: when a young man working with a Big Brother-like mentor program arrives to counsel the increasingly wayward Main, I felt a genuine stirring of relief. A relief that is tempered when it's revealed that Main's grades fell off dramatically in the months following. The most powerful moment in a powerful documentary, however, is when sixth-grader Granny realizes that she doesn't have school supplies and sits by herself in the corner of her grandmother's grimy trailer, weeping. An urgent film, LaLee's Kin demands to be seen, digested, and shared. It's a dose of celluloid perspective served straight but with an artist's elegiac touch.
