‘An American Pastoral’ Review: A Timely and Trenchant Observation of School Board Politics

As Democratic voters lick their wounds from an emphatic defeat in the recent presidential election, a film like “An American Pastoral” isn’t likely to bring much comfort, but it does offer an instructive, microcosmic snapshot of the obstacles they were always facing. Meticulously tracing the arc of a school board election in the small, predominantly conservative Pennsylvania borough of Elizabethtown, this strictly non-interventional documentary by French journalist and filmmaker Auberi Edler offers no narration or commentary on a fraught face-off between ideologically moderate Democrats and a local Republican Party steered by far-right Christian nationalism. Instead, Edler’s calmly watchful film — premiering in the main competition at IDFA, and sure to travel further on the strength of its sharp gaze and topical heft — trusts in viewers to see the national forest for the trees.

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To many non-American audiences, the idea of school board elections being a party matter of community-wide importance — campaigned for and voted on even by residents with no children of schoolgoing age — might seem a curious one. But Edler, a former TV newswoman with a keen eye for the social stakes underpinning banal local politics, swiftly establishes this seemingly small-scale event as a battleground for all manner of culture wars currently consuming the country at large, from LGBTQ rights to critical race theory to gun control. Cannily titled to reflect both the idealized ruralism and insistent Christianity of the right, “An American Pastoral” echoes the public-minded work of Frederick Wiseman in its uncovering of a community’s spirit via its town halls, church gatherings and administrative affairs.

Acting as her own camerawoman, Edler avoids interviews or any form of editorialization — the film even dispenses with onscreen titles to identify key figures and locations, instead letting viewers map out this geographical and sociological terrain for themselves. That also allows for some telling ambiguities: In a town that is fairly uniform in its comfortable whiteness, there’s little way to guess upfront where individuals may land on certain polarizing political issues.

Introductory scenes of candidates canvassing door to door in March 2023, eight months ahead of the election, plainly establish the lines of conflict. Republicans like Tina Wilson approach cheerily before seeding concerns in residents about schoolchildren abruptly changing gender or being sexually groomed via supposedly inappropriate library books. Democrats like Kristy Moore more nervously warn of the “frightening” prospect of the Republicans gaining a school board majority, and plead for the protection of vulnerable minorities in the classroom.

It doesn’t take long to see that Moore and her cohorts have far the steeper hill to climb. If it initially appears that “An American Pastoral” is spending more time at Republican events and rallies than at any Democratic equivalents, the right’s superior resources and numbers in this very red-leaning region soon become clear. It emerges that Republican candidates like Wilson, along with existing board members James Emery and married couple Danielle and Stephen Lindemuth, are all devout congregants of Elizabethtown’s aggressively extremist LifeGate church, where pastors preach the love of Jesus in one breath, and denounce “filthy school board members trying to shove their mentally ill tranny freakshow down the throats of our children” in the next.

At board meetings in the run-up to the election, Democrats voice their fears that LifeGate is targeting the school board with a vision of white supremacist theocracy. (Their opponents focus less on denying this than on denigrating the left.) There’s a notable disconnect between the politics infiltrating the board and what seems to be the generally progressive mindset of school employees: Teachers joke with their students that their curriculum-approved copies of “A Streetcar Named Desire” may be deemed dangerous, and attempt to hold open discussions in class about gun violence. (One is surprised, upon a snap poll, to find that most of his students support the Second Amendment.) Moderate superintendent Karen Nell, meanwhile, worries that the board will soon require her and other school staff to act against their teaching principles.

Away from the matter directly at hand, Edler sits in on other community gatherings that vividly paint the lay of the land: a “Girl and a Gun” women’s firearm workshop, a Christian men’s support group discussing the need for “church platoons” in the “spiritual battle” against the left, a well-attended outdoor anti-choice demonstration, or a more private backyard barbecue where Emery (a ubiquitous community presence) waxes lyrical about his attendance of the January 6 protest. By contrast, a sidewalk rally for Freedom Readers, a liberal group of parents and educators against book-banning, is a quieter affair.

There’s little suspense, then, about the election’s outcome in an area where “Fuck Biden” flags hang from many a front porch. But Edler and editor Barbara Bascou maintain a sense of urgency in this two-hour film by foregrounding human convictions and frailties amid a surfeit of increasingly ugly rhetoric: the Republicans certain, however ill-advisedly, that they’re saving the soul of their community, and the Democrats grimly facing defeat, and finding a way to endure in the place they still call home.

In certain scenes, “An American Pastoral” finds a mordant comedy in the ideological impasse between these factions: In one town hall meeting, a Republican state representative argues that residents have “the right to defend themselves from a tyrannical government,” before one bemused attendee points out that he’s part of a state government himself. Amid all this back and forth, meanwhile, the voices of the young people most directly affected by school board changes go unheard, entirely disenfranchised in the matter. The children may be the future, but nobody’s letting them lead the way just yet.