A Place at the Table

As important and eye-opening a documentary as you’ll see this year, A Place at the Table makes it impossible to think of hunger as merely another symptom of a shredded social safety net.

A Place at the Table is a fairly no-frills effort, but the ideas behind it are sound.

The film bolsters its case with plenty of facts, charts and expert testimony - evidence typical of this sort of advocacy documentary. But what makes the movie compelling is its focus on a handful of victims, who make the statistics painfully real.

More difficult to convey are the web of moral and political issues that surround the hunger crisis, and A Place at the Table proves its worth most by how it treats this wider set of problems.

A Place at the Table attempts to document its subject with the progressive angle and emotional effect of such docs as "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Waiting for Superman."

Though the directors, Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush, smartly choose examples from among the working poor — reframing obesity as chronic malnourishment in areas where it’s easier to find a burger than a banana — they’re reluctant to get down in the political dirt.

As morally engaged as the movie is, it’s also argumentatively slack. Precisely because it’s so easy to agree that hunger is bad, it’s hard to agree what to do.