Movie Review: "Welcome To Leith"

"Welcome To Leith": B-.  Every state has dots on the map which call themselves towns, but North Dakota has more than its share.  Leith, a one-horse, no stoplight village alone on the prairies of southwestern Nodak, is one of them.  The official 2010 census lists the population at sixteen, although at the time Welcome To Leith was filmed three years later, the townsfolk claimed "twenty-four, including children."  It was the twenty-fifth resident, Craig Cobb, who caused all the commotion, leading documentarians Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher Walker to begin their project.

People who live in towns like Leith are a fascinating lot.  They cherish their independence and value their privacy.  They do not rely on the government to support the hardscrabble way of life they have chosen.  They see and fully appreciate the stark beauty of the windswept land, with all the sights and sounds that nature provides.  Those things are trade-offs which they gladly accept at a cost of not being afforded the conveniences and amenities of city life.  Small towns on the plains have inhabitants who typically mind their own business, yet pitch in when a neighbor needs help.  One might say the residents are simultaneously tight-knit yet loose-knit vis-a-vis each other.

When the bespectacled Cobb quietly arrived in August 2013, he was noticed immediately.  Not that many strangers found their way into Leith, and Cobb's wild long gray hair, cane and long sleeve white shirt caused him to stand out.  Most of Leith's denizens took him for a laborer employed by the burgeoning Bakken Oil companies an hour away.  One woman's initial thought was to tip off her mother that she should check out the new guy as a potential romantic interest.  Little did they know that this lanky sixty-one year old man was a white supremacist with a plot to turn their little burg into a neo-Nazi haven.  Ironically, Cobb's plan was to accomplish all this legally.  When he made his first purchase of a ramshackle Leith house, his neighbors were unaware that said acquisition was merely the first step in his quest to move his fellow hate-filled sympathizers into home ownership there.  If he and his clan could get to the point where they'd constitute a majority in Leith, they would be able to pass laws favorable to their warped point of view, thus affording them the ability to operate with impunity.

The film does not explicitly connect the dots as to how the townsfolk uncovered Cobb's Aryan Nation plot.  Perhaps it was the arrival of offbeat characters like Kynan Dutton with Hitleresque mustaches, bald heads and rifles.  Maybe it was their women, who gave the appearance of having just arrived from a Sturgis bike rally.  Most probably, the biggest clue was the assortment of flags, each representing a "formerly all-white nation," displayed on Cobb's property.  The Leith people were smart enough to enlist the help of the Grant County Sheriff's office as soon as Cobb's scheme came to light.

From that point, Welcome To Leith chronicles the strategy employed by the townsfolk to keep Cobb and his cronies at bay.  The cameras take us into the homes of a couple of long-time Leith citizens.  We witness kitchen table interviews, town hall meetings and informal barroom conversations in nearby New Leipzig.  Nichols and Walker attempt to balance the footage by interviewing Cobb and a few skinheads, who are surprisingly willing to grant the filmmakers access. Cobb and company are not really given equal time in the film, but we get where they're coming from without the point being belabored.

The biggest hurdle for the people of the town matches the biggest problem with the film.  When the actions of Cobb and his followers are scrutinized from a legal perspective, it is hard to find any words or actions which are prohibited by law.  There is no law against flying a controversial flag, bearing an unchambered gun or spewing hate (unless it incites a riot).  Generally, the Constitution allows nincompoops to do their thing, as long as their behavior does not directly harm another.  No punches are thrown and no shots are fired.  No threats of physical harm are uttered, although Cobb does make the mistake of challenging a man to a fight.  Nothing is stolen or vandalized.  Cobb's mind is warped, but you have to give the devil his due; arguably he's smart enough to stay within the bounds of the law.  I wrote "arguably" because there is a point where Cobb is incarcerated -- a result of ineffective counsel, I'd guess -- but the film does a poor job of showing us why.  Perhaps the County Sheriff, who is not a lawyer, does not realize the weaknesses in the prosecution's case (he appears uncertain what to do), but the State's Attorney does.    

Welcome To Leith is fascinating, depressing and scary.  Fascinating for what it might be like to live in a tiny place forgotten by all but a handful of people.  Depressing to realize that, as is the case for all documentaries, these are real people, not actors, we are seeing.  The mindset of the neo-Nazis who invade Leith is so misguided that it's hard to believe they are Americans.  Scary, because we wonder what the future will bring for our country, a country which desperately needs unity, when there are radical thinkers living on the edge of society.  A powder keg ready to explode?