'The Fall of Minneapolis' is Orwellian nonsense

Derek Chauvin, the right’s favorite murderer, finally gets his say in this poorly made, even more poorly argued documentary

George Floyd Square, Minneapolis, in September 2021 (photo by author)

(Note: This movie was watched, and this review was written, almost entirely before the news over the weekend that Derek Chauvin was stabbed in prison. The news does not change my view of the film in any meaningful way.) 

Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. Not only is this a fact, sustained by a court of law, but the murder was committed, live on video, and it’s a video that every single person reading this has seen. Floyd’s murder has probably been viewed more times by more people than any other individual killing in U.S. history, with the possible exception of the Kennedy assassination. 

For a police officer to be fired, arrested, tried, and convicted of murder, in the United States of America, has a high, high bar. George Floyd’s murder was so brutal and so wrong — in addition to happening on camera — that it cleared that bar. Chauvin has been convicted of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter, and pled guilty to separate charges of violating Floyd’s civil rights, and the other three police officers have been convicted as well.

So now comes The Fall of Minneapolis, a ludicrous new documentary that, while throwing a lot of victim-blaming, blame-shifting, and other nonsense at the wall to see what sticks, is dedicated to the Orwellian notion that what every one of us has seen with our own eyes is not what really happened. Mostly, it makes arguments that have already failed in court, in some cases multiple times.

A mural in Minneapolis, taken in September 2021 (author photo)

And as a Twin Cities native, let me add: This documentary, and the people in it, show a deep and bitter contempt for the city of Minneapolis — a place that I love very much — and the people who live there. It’s a great city, and it hasn’t “fallen.” 

The Fall of Minneapolis, directed by JC Chaix, is a project of the Minnesota conservative news website Alpha News which, hilariously, was also the name of the Fox News-like network owned by Edward Norton’s villain character in the movie Glass Onion.

A lot of reporters, in a lot of cities, act essentially as extensions of that city’s police department, providing the cops’ spin for local news audiences. But most of them have not literally married the city’s police union chief while doing so. 

That’s the case of Liz Collin, the longtime reporter for local station WCCO who fronts the documentary, building on her previously published book. Collin is married to Bob Kroll, the notorious longtime, since-retired head of the Minneapolis police union, and for some time, she reported for WCCO without disclosing that. 

Collin interviews Chauvin himself, from prison, as well as various other current and former Minneapolis cops, and the level of rigor of the questions calls to mind all the times Sean Hannity sat down for hard-hitting interviews with Donald Trump. 

Now there was a time, in the immediate aftermath of the killing of Floyd, that there was not much conservative defense of Derek Chauvin and the other Minneapolis police officers responsible for Floyd’s death, even from those who normally side with the police in high-profile brutality cases. Both locally and nationally, the right-wing media line, in that summer of 2020, was to immediately pivot to the looting and riots as the truly important thing that was happening, without ever fully taking the plunge into the Derek Chauvin Innocence Project. 

The Fall of Minneapolis takes that plunge with both feet. 

Beginning with body cam footage of Floyd’s killing which, despite some of the hype, is not new or never-before-seen, the film argues that Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose and that Chauvin placed his knee on his neck at the same time for nine minutes was, I guess, just a coincidence. Even though Floyd was, you know, alive at the beginning of the nine minutes and dead at the end of it. Numerous witnesses testified at trial that while Floyd did have drugs in his system, that was not what caused his death.

Based on the documentary’s tone, the title really should have been “Why George Floyd Deserved to Die, and Why We’re Glad He’s Dead.” Or maybe “He Should Have Complied: The Movie.”

There’s also a Chauvin interview that adds little of note – he calls his trial a “sham” — as well as some cops who are just so angry about how mean everyone was about that whole killing-of-Floyd thing. We also hear from Derek Chauvin’s mother, and you’re not going to believe this, but she thinks he’s innocent too. 

There are ludicrous conspiracy theories, including the view of an out-of-town pathologist, who has never actually examined Floyd, but who claims that Floyd died of a “rare tumor.”

You’d have no idea, from this film, about any of the long history of misconduct and brutality on the part of the Minneapolis Police Department, or for that matter any of the numerous abuses that took place in the aftermath of Floyd’s death. The latter resulted in a $600,000 settlement with the ACLU, which included a ten-year ban on Liz Collin’s hubby, Bob Kroll, from serving in three counties’ police departments. The officers interviewed in the film, in fact, express anger that they weren’t allowed to get tougher, during those protests against police brutality.

There’s also not a word about Chauvin’s extensive history of use-of-force complaints, some of which involved choking. 

You’ll hear a lot of very familiar rhetorical tricks. We’re told “How can crime be down?” when a particular viral video right here shows people being violent.  We’re shown footage of politicians like Mayor Jacob Frey and Gov. Tim Walz, sympathizing with the protests, but you’d get less of a sense that both politicians, especially Walz, forcefully denounced rioting and looting, while Frey famously declared, to boos, that he does not support defunding the police. Nor, for that matter, that the two men were often at odds at the time. (Frey and Walz have both since been re-elected, indicating that Minnesotans are uniquely turned off by the Alpha News-style worldview of the state’s GOP.) 

As bad as the content is, the production values are even worse. The combination of poor argumentation, cheap presentation, and SPOOKY music is annoying enough when liberal-leaning documentaries do it — and they do do it, quite a lot. But it’s even worse here. 

The Fall of Minneapolis is part of a worrisome trend in conservative documentary filmmaking, of filmmakers insulting their audience by telling them things that aren’t true. In last year’s 2000 Mules, Dinesh D’Souza built an entire feature documentary around a 2020 election conspiracy theory that was, I’m not exaggerating, fabricated out of whole cloth. We see the same thing with all of the releases of “new January 6 footage,” which purports to exonerate the Donald Trump piglets who sought to attack the Capitol that day, but to date seems to have only led to further arrests. 

“Derek Chauvin didn’t kill George Floyd” is nothing less than a Big Lie, kind of like “Donald Trump won the 2020 election,” and “January 6 was not an insurrection.” 

The objective here is not, I would imagine, to get Chauvin freed from prison — the U.S. Supreme Court, that noted liberal bastion, has chosen not to hear his appeal– nor is it to change the narrative in any meaningful way. The idea is to give conservative audiences absolution and to affirm their instinct that police are always the good guys and can do no wrong. Because if the killing of George Floyd wasn’t improper, then no police brutality, anywhere, could ever be improper. 

The Fall of Minneapolis is an attempt, albeit a failed one, to defend and excuse the absolute worst that American policing has to offer.