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‘An American Pastoral’ Review: A Timely and Trenchant Observation of School Board Politics
Auberi Edler's 'An American Pastoral' patiently and perceptively tracks a year-long electoral campaign in a conservative Pennsylvania town.
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. 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. 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.
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