I have not seen Matt Walsh's first documentary, What Is a Woman?, partly because it requires a Daily Wire subscription and partly because I feel like I know enough from ads. Possibly everyone's opinion of it depends entirely on whether they already agreed with him on the issue. Meanwhile, his second doc, AIR?, is doing quite well at the box office for a non-Hollywood effort and has high marks on both IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, tho pro critics were slow to begin reviewing it. Since at least one theater stopped running it due to backlash, I decided not to wait long.
This time, Walsh acts like a cross between Michael Moore and Sacha Baron Cohen, only conservative. He goes on an "antiracist journey" that includes reading bestselling books on the subject, getting an online DEI certificate, meeting with self-styled experts as well as regular folk off the street, and eventually giving his own course that purports to make white people less racist -- until he "realizes" that such efforts appear to help nothing but the teachers' finances.
A brief background: Walsh has previously summarized himself as "an a-hole," and I doubt that a majority of his own fans would contest that assessment. His videos trend toward blunt negativity, including complaints I've never heard from anyone else. In that regard, this movie is a bit of a departure, because he pretends to take his opponents' words as gospel. He also describes himself as "not human" when it comes to emotional expression, which explains why I and others often have difficulty telling whether he's being sincere.
Despite many saying that he "pulled a Borat," Walsh does have some significant differences from Cohen. First, his humor is not gross in the usual sense, tho you may feel disgust at one or more personalities. The PG-13 rating is entirely for a handful of moderate swear words he doesn't say, plus a slur on a book cover he didn't write. Second, he mostly tries to blend in, not stick out like a sore thumb. OK, he waxes outspoken and veers into caricature, but it's subtle enough that few people seem to suspect a thing. (His disguise as a stereotypical leftist scholar is awfully thin, but most people he meets don't watch his videos.)
I'm still not sure exactly how much of AIR? can rightly be called honest. There are a couple clear imagination sequences, and I'm pretty sure Walsh didn't get a real "Black Power" tattoo on his shoulder, especially since he never shows it again after appearing to finish it. Key figures on screen, most notably White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, have condemned him for minor deception about his identity and purpose, but they have yet to accuse the filmmakers of misleading cuts or incorrectly obscene price quotes, so perhaps their depiction is accurate. His main point in not being forthright was to persuade them to be, well, candid on camera.
I think everyone in this movie looks only as silly as they let themselves, and maybe half of them act fully decent. Part of the fun for me is in imagining what I would have done if present at the awkward scenarios. While some who adopt Walsh's political position are choosing not to watch the movie because they hate cringe comedies, I found myself more comfortable than usual with it.
I won't insist that Walsh doesn't have a racist bone in his body, nor will I make that claim about myself. But he does reveal a fair deal about how people in different walks of life perceive questions of racism, whether systemic or personal. I'm afraid almost no one on screen exhibits a race other than white or black, but hey, the makers wanted to keep it simple for a 101-minute runtime.
A mixed-race crowd attended at my theater, and pretty much everyone laughed a lot. This helped me feel free to laugh too, even at moments I'd seen in clips. And no, they didn't spoil all the good parts.
Unless you have a strong ideological opposition to a doc (or moc?) that derides anti-white sentiment, I recommend checking out AIR? while you can. It speaks to more viewers than you might have assumed.
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