'Waging a Living'

Pay in, pay out

Roger Weisberg's documentary bypasses the facade of an ownership society to reveal a debtor's society. Here the working poor fruitlessly break their backs and spirits in dead-end jobs, reduced to a cross between Sisyphus and a hamster on a wheel, perpetually trying to roll themselves and their families above the poverty line and inadvertently "hustling backwards" instead. Chronicling three years in the lives of a nursing assistant who must support a terminally ill daughter; a bank security guard living in a single-room-occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin and saving to visit children he hasn't seen in nine years; a single mother of five struggling to earn a degree but stymied by capriciously volatile government benefits; and a waitress with three children forced toward food pantries and financial ruin after a gruesome divorce, Waging a Living is straightforward vérité, unadorned and artless, and anything but predictably grim – the appearance of a "six months later" title can generate wrenching suspense. Rosevelt's America, a sweet short from Weisberg and Tod Lending, supplements the feature and plays like a lost chapter as a refugee, Rosevelt Henderson, slaves away at poignantly menial jobs so he can bring his wife over to America from his native Liberia. Waging a Living will only appear on a few screens for a few weeks but deserves a residency at every theater in the country, where it can reach those who'll recognize aspects of their lives onscreen and haunt those who won't.

(Ihsan Amanatullah)