An American Bombing: The Road to April 19th (now streaming on Max) finds director Marc Levin and longtime producing partner Daphne Pinkerson returning to a story they visited in 1996, for NBC documentary Oklahoma City: One Year Later. The new doc is a deeper retrospective that pieces together the narrative of Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, killing 168 people. Levin also broadens the perspective, looking into the origins of the type of modern right-wing extremism that birthed McVeigh – and asserts, quite compellingly, that the nastiest domestic terrorist on record wasn’t a “lone wolf,” but rather a piece of a larger cabal.
The Gist: Kathy Sanders remembers the morning of April 19, 1995 in great detail. She sang her grandsons awake, fed them breakfast and drove them to the daycare center in the Oklahoma City federal building. Not long thereafter, her son, at the time off duty from his job as a police officer, spotted his nephew among a line of dead children. He wanted to hug the boy and say goodbye but was stopped. This was a crime scene, he was told. The body was evidence. We see disturbing archival footage of people staggering, bleeding, away from the decimated building; officials cradle injured children, taking them to get medical assistance. The media jumped to a big, dumb conclusion that this horror was the result of Islamic terrorism. We see President Bill Clinton ask the American people to let the investigation play out before pointing fingers. Then we see Clinton, today, saying he thought from the beginning that the attack had a lot of the hallmarks of domestic terrorism, the likes of which he saw brewing among militias while he was governor of Arkansas.
We likely already know the bare bones of the rest of the story: McVeigh, oddly, was already in custody for driving without a license plate and carrying an unlicensed gun. He was tried, convicted and, in 2001, executed by lethal injection, showing no remorse. His motive was to start an American revolution – among his final words, he called himself the winner of this conflict, because the tally was McVeigh 168, the U.S. government 1. From here, Levin interviews journalists, family members of victims, lawyers involved in McVeigh’s case, numerous government officials and even a former right-wing extremist, assembling a much bigger picture to contextualize the bombing.
Levin jumps back to 1983, labeled on screen as the “first wave.” In the wake of President Carter’s ban on exporting crops to Russia, farmers took a significant financial hit; President Reagan subsequently vetoed a bailout package, essentially leaving them to suffer. The seeds of anti-government discord were planted, and militias began to form, rallying around white supremacist and Christian fundamentalist ideologies. By the ’90s, the militia movement coalesced in tragic events in Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas, both notable for the U.S. government’s bungled attempts to end stalemate sieges with heavily armed extremists; the former resulted in high-profile conspiracy charges that the defendants successfully fended off, and the latter found McVeigh in attendance as 80 people in the Waco compound died as it burned. McVeigh was galvanized, but so were many others. By the time Levin gets to the “third wave,” we see images from the Jan. 6 resurrection. It’s all part of the same mosaic of modern American history.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It’s surely not a stretch to say An American Bombing is a spiritual predecessor to HBO’s Jan. 6 doc Four Hours at the Capitol.
Performance Worth Watching: Sanders has been steadfast in her insistence that McVeigh did not act alone, that the government wasn’t diligent in trying only McVeigh and one accomplice, Terry Nichols. She even went so far as to correspond with Nichols while he was in prison, as she found comfort in forgiveness.
Memorable Dialogue: Bud Welch, who lost his daughter in the bombing, famously fought against giving McVeigh the death penalty, and even reached out to McVeigh’s father to offer comfort. Why? “The day that our parents die, we go to the hilltop and we bury them,” he said. “The day our children die, we buy them in our hearts. And that never goes away.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: There’s a clearer, sharper argument to be made than what Levin posits in An American Bombing. The film covers a lot of ground – the origins of the modern white supremacist movement, the emotional fallout from the bombing, the U.S. government’s inability to land a solid blow against domestic extremism – but sometimes feels like its handful of narrative threads are shuffled together, and could be edited down to finer points that make stronger statements.
But the film is nevertheless informative and eye-opening in its retrospective scrutiny of a true American tragedy. Levin reveals a strong sense of disillusionment among military veterans who return from war – in McVeigh’s case, the Gulf War – with no job or sense of purpose, and a likely case of PTSD. Most interesting are the interviews with Kerry Noble, the former extremist who provides insight that confirms and expounds upon many of our assumptions about Christian right-wing militias (he shares an anecdote about how his particular group of wackos wanted to target a church that functioned as a safe space for gay people, but he changed his tune when he ended up seeing them as fellow Christians); Noble could be the focus of a separate documentary.
Levin tick-tocks through McVeigh’s life and misdeeds, shows us how the right-wing media trendsetters had been grousing about Democrats taking their guns for decades before the slew of mass shootings in recent years, and frequently returns to Sanders and Welch so the film balances emotional and intellectual approaches. The overall story touches on racism, religion, capital punishment, cults and the proliferation of weapons in America – too much to cover in 106 minutes. But the film eventually lands on two assertions: Journalist Mike Boettcher puts it bluntly when he says the bombing was a sign for America to “wake up.” And Clinton says McVeigh’s statements and reasoning “literally sound like the mainstream today.”
Our Call: STREAM IT. Cluttered as An American Bombing can occasionally be, it’s nevertheless convincing in its intent.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.