‘Separated’ Review: Errol Morris Draws a Thin, Clear Line Through a Trump-Era Conspiracy to Deter Refugees

Once an outsider to the system, now as influential a docmaker as the industry has, Errol Morris has dedicated his career to drawing our attention to subjects — be they individuals or issues — we might otherwise overlook. Sometimes they are frivolous and fringy, like a Florida pet cemetery ("Gates of Heaven") or a drug-induced defenestration ("Wormwood"). But the ones that really matter force us to confront truths we may be actively trying to avoid, such as euthanasia ("Mr. Death") or the use of torture at Abu Ghraib prison ("Standard Operating Procedure").

" Separated " finds Morris back in "The Fog of War" mode: angry, engaged and determined to expose an injustice too monumental to be ignored — despite so many Americans' efforts to do just that. Adapted from NBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff's book of the same name, the blood-boiling doc offers a damning analysis of how the Trump's "zero tolerance" policy toward illegal entry ripped immigrant families apart with no serious mechanism for reuniting them in the future.

"Harm to children was part of the point," says Jonathan White, a committed public servant who saw his department, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), hijacked by a blatantly inhumane strategy which the Trump administration implemented for its deterrent potential. "They believed it would terrify families into not coming." White isn't exactly a whistleblower, although he comes across as no less courageous in describing a dictated-from-the-top family separation scheme for which he had a front-row seat.

"Separated" plays not as a screed, but as a thriller, even as it openly vilifies key players like Stephen Miller (Trump's xenophobia-stoking senior advisor), former attorney General Jeff Sessions and "nasty"-acting ICE honcho Thomas Homan ("That's what I'm looking for," Trump insisted). You can feel the tension as Morris untangles the trail of responsibility, drawing a thin, clear line through a real-world conspiracy that resulted in more than 4,000 kids — some no more than infants — being whisked away to facilities far removed from their parents.

Because the scale is too great for most people to comprehend, Morris casts two actors, Gabriela Cartol and Diego Armando Lara Lagunes, who play a Guatemalan mother and child shown hastily packing their bags before making the dangerous trip across Mexico to the United States. In a few shots, Morris focuses on the ragged teddy bear that Diego runs back inside to collect ... and which he later nearly loses when crossing the Rio Grande. That's a rare case of emotional manipulation among these artfully framed sequences, which break up the talking heads and bureaucratic text, serving to humanize the crossing (and subsequent separation) process.

Without these interstitials, "Separated" might have felt like an abstract conversation. But seeing a mother and child impacted by those policies sparks the kind of empathy the administrations tried so hard to avoid. How else to explain how carefully media-controlled the coverage was? Soboroff serves as a key witness here, describing how cameras were forbidden and he was only allowed to bring a small notebook when visiting the facility in McAllen, Texas, where he witnessed "kids locked up in cages" — an image Morris has already introduced via his reenactment footage.

Beneath these scenes reverberate the ominous undulations of composer Paul Leonard-Morgan's deliberately Philip Glass-sounding score. Over more than four decades, Morris has developed and refined his style to such a slick degree that "Separated" can sometimes feel too polished for its own good. As a filmmaker, he's never been neutral — and makes no claims toward objectivity. "There is such a thing as truth, but we often have a vested interest in ignoring it or outright denying it," Morris told NPR's "All Things Considered" back in 2005, and here, he uses editing tricks to reveal a lie or trigger an ironic laugh.

Elaine Duke, former acting head of the Department of Homeland Security, describes how she was shown the door. "I don't think I'm the stereotype of what he was looking for," she says, as Morris flashes photos of Trump embracing her blond successor, Kirstjen Nielsen, as if she were a Miss America contestant. It's a cheap shot, perhaps justified in cases when the devil does wear Prada. The film addresses Nielsen's two-faced legacy via Soboroff's own recollections, including a split-second, slo-mo snippet from a "Dateline" interview where she momentarily breaks her ice-cold façade.

Morris is sophisticated enough to know that some of his techniques are actually cheats, designed to skew how audiences receive the information. History has already revealed the family separation policy to be monstrous, and here, he gives audiences the satisfaction of seeing the culprits squirm — as in that Nielsen outtake, or in an unexpected one-on-one with Scott Lloyd, the bureaucratic "yes man" Trump tapped to oversee ORR. Now there's someone who probably should have declined Morris' interview request.

As White puts it, "Scott Lloyd is the most prolific child abuser in modern American history." The heroes in this film are those who worked under him at the ORR, like White and Jallyn Sualog (who maintained a list of names that helped show what was happening), as well as ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt, who resisted what they knew to be wrong and worked together to reunify children torn from their parents.

Morris incorporates a spinning-zoetrope motif throughout, first seen during a prologue that quotes previous presidents, whose policies paved the way for such an extreme solution. It's a reminder how the issue, far from resolved, keeps coming up in presidential campaigns — and how no one wants a sequel to a film like "Separated."