Most documentaries about the nineteenth-century freethought movement fail in one of two directions: they flatten their subjects into a procession of heroic doubters, or they hedge so carefully about the subjects’ contradictions that the result is less a portrait than a disclaimer. Claire Havemann’s three-part Radicals does neither. It is unusually willing to let its subjects be both admirable and discomfiting, often in the same sentence.
The three episodes center on Robert Ingersoll, Annie Besant, and the less-remembered Charles Bradlaugh, respectively. Each is allowed to speak in the words of their own published work — the film is generous with primary sources — and each is followed by a thoughtful, un-cynical commentary from a rotating cast of historians who disagree among themselves. The result is a documentary that trusts its audience to hold more than one thing at once.
What the Film Gets Right
The Ingersoll episode, which I expected to be the most familiar, is surprising. Havemann does not smooth over his racial attitudes or the limits of his political imagination on questions like women’s suffrage, which arrived later for him than it should have. But she also does not substitute easy moralism for analysis: she situates the contradictions, and makes clear what Ingersoll did and did not do with the considerable platform he had. The effect is unusual in the genre — you come away respecting him more, because the respect is being offered to a real nineteenth-century person rather than a flattering projection.
Besant’s episode is the most ambitious. Her trajectory — from a free-thinking critic of the church, to a radical secularist, to a Theosophist, to a figure in Indian independence politics — is the kind of story that a weaker documentary would either shorten or rearrange. Havemann lets it unfold in its actual messiness. The sequence on the Bradlaugh–Besant birth-control trial is the best twenty minutes of the entire series: a prosecution that the defendants welcomed, as a platform, becomes a meditation on when doing the right thing looks exactly like being a self-promoter.
The Bradlaugh episode is the quietest and the finest. Havemann resists the temptation to make the oath controversy — Bradlaugh’s six-year fight to be seated in Parliament without swearing on the Bible — into a triumphalist narrative. The film acknowledges what it cost him, what it cost his family, and what the fight did and did not win; the final sequence, on the later lives of his allies, carries an honest kind of weight.
Reservations
The film’s one real weakness is a structural one: Havemann is clearly more interested in her British material than her American, and the American episodes sometimes feel compressed against the British ones. A viewer coming to the subject cold might finish the series with the impression that the center of the nineteenth-century freethought movement was in London; a fuller picture would include more on the American Secular Union and on the women who staffed the movement’s journals.
But this is quibbling. Radicals is the best documentary treatment of its subject in memory, and it is made in a spirit the subjects themselves would have recognized — a seriousness about ideas that refuses to pretend its heroes are saints.