What We Do Next is a small, fascinating indie chamber piece from writer/director Stephen Belber. Originally conceived as a play, the film utilizes close-knitted settings to depict the conflict between three characters across seven distinct scenes, bridged by an unseen reporter’s voice. The narrative’s intersection of race, class, and social justice provides both an individual and a universal exploration of abusive systems from the perspectives the people trapped, and attempting to work, within them.
The opening scene sees Elsa (Michelle Veintimilla) and Sandy (Karen Pittman) as the latter attempts to extricate Elsa an abusive household. The exchange is the basis for the rest of the story, as Sandy’s offer of help ripples outward into events that will affect multiple lives. The next sequence involves Sandy and Paul (Corey Stoll), many years later, as they discuss Sandy’s campaign for city councilwoman and the problems that may arise from her helping Elsa. Sandy gave Elsa money, ostensibly from Paul, to help protect her and her brother from her father’s abuse. But Elsa used the money to buy the gun that eventually kills her father, for which she spends sixteen years in prison. Over the course of their conversation, Paul volunteers to take public blame by claiming he gave Elsa the money, effectively exonerating Sandy in the eyes of her constituents. The sticking point is Elsa—she has to agree to the lie that will protect the woman who helped her and who now has a flourishing political career. The relatively minor question of the five hundred dollars, and the lies told about it, builds over the course of the seven scenes, as each character contributes their desires, untruths, and misunderstandings.
What We Do Next is less about individual culpability and more about the failures of institutions that even well-meaning people work within. The question of race—a Black councilwoman, a white male lawyer, and an abused Latina teenager—further highlights the complex interplay of class and violence. Elsa’s suffering is as much at the hands of the institution that fails to help her as at the hands of her (unseen) father, and Sandy’s well-meaning but possibly misguided attempts to give her a way out. The system stinks, the film says. Sandy’s refrain that she’s trying to help people like Elsa in her work as councilwoman and her eventual campaign to become mayor is both heartfelt and ultimately hollow, as she fails at helping Elsa herself. But Elsa is also caught into a disturbing web—her initial crime flows from male violence, and her time in prison shapes her identity to the point that who she might have been becomes distinct from who she is. She’s both responsible for her later behavior and not responsible; the system itself has shaped her, and that includes Sandy.
The bridge between these two characters is Paul. There’s a troubling undercurrent here of an affluent white man acting as the go-between for two women of color, one in a position of tenuous power and the other existing on law’s edge where a single slip can send her back to prison. Paul has the least to lose and is also the most insulated of the three characters, a fact which the film acknowledges but doesn’t really explore. There’s one scene between Paul and Elsa that unfortunately trades on sexist and racist tropes to cast Paul not quite as a victim, but certainly a Good Guy, one who understands his privilege without doing much about it.
Overall, though, What We Do Next fulfills its project of exploring a strikingly individual case and the ripple effects it has on the lives of the three characters. In so doing, it highlights the problems of fighting against institutionalized abuse, racism, sexism, and classism from within the system. Nor does the film promise a solution. The question posed by the title has no easy answers, and even those people whose stated projects are to make lives better for the marginalized and underserved find themselves actively working against their better natures to successfully operate within the system. At the end of the day, justice is distinct from law and the victims, poor, marginalized, female, people of color, still suffer the most.
