‘Heightened Scrutiny' Review: A Transgender Attorney Heads to the Supreme Court in an Emotional and Informative Doc
The visual approach in 'Heightened Scrutiny' — Sam Feder's documentary following a transgender lawyer prepping for a U.S. Supreme Court case — seems familiar at the outset. Its straightforward approach to locked-off sit-down interviews, interspersed with graphics and other B-roll footage, is hardly novel. However, an immense amount of care and detail goes into its construction, deepening its use of traditional form and packing a powerful punch.
'Heightened Scrutiny' follows ACLU attorney Chase Strangio, as he prepares to become the first transgender person to make arguments before the Supreme Court. However, this superlative — while it's certainly compared to other civil rights landmarks — is but a fleeting detail in the face of how vital the case in question might be. United States v. Skrmetti is, at the time of the film's Sundance premiere, still ongoing, and is set to determine whether Tennessee banning hormone therapy and puberty blockers for transgender youth violates the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.
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For those unaware of the particulars, Strangio makes persuasive arguments to the camera. But 'Heightened Scrutiny' isn't just concerned with specific legalese. Feder seems aware that what determines such a ruling is much larger than constitutional language, and he therefore takes aim at the media building blocks of anti-transgender prejudice — the way Feder's previous work, 'Disclosure,' examined trans films in Hollywood — and the way news stories inform lawmaking. The film, in this way, takes on an occasionally essayistic form, as it holds major news organizations like The New York Times and The Atlantic accountable in jaw-dropping, thorough detail.
Its arguments are as academic as they are emotional. Strangio is joined by a number of trans activists — including famous faces like Elliot Page, and an outspoken 12-year-old named Mila — in not only expounding upon daily prejudices and hypocrisies of anti-trans alarmism, but also daily mundanities. In capturing Mila's family dinners, and in following Strangio home, watching him pick out outfits, and fawn over his cat, the movie's key persuasion becomes the everyday relatability of its subjects.
What separates 'Heightened Scrutiny' from similarly straightforward works is that it takes its time. Despite its slim 89-minute runtime, it feels entirely rigorous in its unraveling of personal and practical information. You could throw a penny blindfolded and have it land on a documentary that employs fleeting expert testimonials; where Feder's movie stands apart is that none of its interviewees are mere talking heads — whether lawyers, journalists, parents of trans children, or celebrities like Peppermint and Laverne Cox. No single subject is used merely to add color. Rather, they become full-fledged, fully-formed characters in and of themselves, whose inner lives are the focus as much as their expertise.
Furthermore, the film never separates these facets of their experience; their emotional connection to the case is paramount. As if in stern rebuke to the 'just asking questions' crowd, who reduce people's real lives to intellectual exercises, 'Heightened Scrutiny' interweaves thought and feeling simultaneously. Strangio may be the movie's anchor, but as much as he builds legal arguments, his sense of camaraderie with the film's other trans subjects widens the scope of what's at stake for trans lives, and for America as a whole, in the years to come. Beyond all the legal and even medical specifics resides a sense of communal understanding, and — at the risk of sounding mawkish — a deep and abiding love for one's fellow human beings, which Feder taps into with aplomb.
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