To reverse the Faulknerian rhetoric, the people in ["Welfare"] (as in "High School," "Juvenile Court," and "Titicut Follies") don't prevail but endure—barely. Anger hangs in the air and not all of the anger belongs to the welfare petitioners…. It is Wiseman's most tendentious film, hard-bearing and bitter-edged, and those who expect comprehensiveness or balanced-scale fairness are going to be infuriated.

And they'll have a good case, for Wiseman makes no attempt to show the Other Side (e.g., welfare chiselers, or people who escape from poverty because of welfare assistance); he's interested only in the victims … that Wiseman is unfair to the welfare system is like complaining that Charles Dickens was unfair to prisons in "Little Dorrit." No, what goes wrong in "Welfare" is that the documentary approach no longer seems expressive enough to convey Wiseman's social vision.

Technically, however, this latest work is his best: unpretentiously photographed …, crisply edited, and recorded with a clarity which captures every vocal inflection. Wiseman's great gift as a filmmaker is his patience—he lets a scene go on and on to the edge of boredom, and then over into revelation. There are three such scenes in "Welfare."… These are among Wiseman's greatest moments because they reveal the poignancy of people losing their dignity, their bearings, their lives under a firmament of fluorescent lights.

But the worst scenes … well, by now it's banal to invoke Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty. When discreet the movie is superb but at the end, when Wiseman tries for dramatic thunder, he allows people to stridently perform for the lens. A destitute man wanders into an administrator's office and begins laying on his troubles, pouring out his soul. It's soon obvious that he's addressing his misery to the wrong supervisor and finally the supervisor asks, "Why are you telling me all this?" And, of course, the unspoken answer is: That's where the camera is. The scene falsifies even more as the man slumps in a chair and begins talking, trying to strike a bargain with God, even mentioning that he's waiting for Godot—it's awful. The guy seems to have wandered in from the set of a Cassavetes film….

"Welfare" represents a culmination of Wiseman's social vision since "Titicut Follies," a despairing vision which holds that the white walls of prisons and hospitals and schools can hide the suffering of millions, but can't contain it. As quickly as it is mopped up, more blood is spilled. Yet "Welfare" is also a compromise; I think Wiseman has greater designs. For what Wiseman needs to give us is not just the prison but the streets and alleys which lead to the prison. Lionel Trilling has written that the prison isn't merely a symbol, "its connection with the will is real, it is the practical instrument for the negation of man's will which the will of society has contrived." Wiseman has graphically shown us the negation (particularly in "High School") and the histrionic moments in "Welfare" intimate that he's anxious to go beyond it. He's a lawyer, and I think he's ready to aim higher with his indictments.