The man known as the Mayor of Aurora is a skinny, rumpled guy who looks like a vagrant but lives in a spacious mobile home. In the first scene of the documentary Sweetheart Deal, he sits on a park bench, lures in a pigeon, and captures it by hand. His name is Laughn Doescher, but he goes by his middle name, Elliott. He comes on as a sort of saint, affording comfort to a vulnerable population. Aurora is a section of Seattle, Washington, and is a center of drugs and prostitution, a sort of skid row of strip malls and neon signs.
The movie about Elliot starts out laudatory. He’s a character and smooth talker with his scraggly hair and pocked complexion. On good days, he’s a silver-tongued merry prankster. Then he turns evangelical—he calls addiction “the Monster” as he watches his charge writhe and whine in agony. Elliott is oddly endearing. We look past his filthy habitat, the grimy pans and scummy dishes, the butt-filled ashtrays, because he’s doing good. He’s not an addict himself, yet he takes in these poor souls, giving them a place to be, feeding them, and helping them kick.
Word about him spreads. A female newspaper reporter comes to interview him. He takes a shine to her. “No wonder you have a stalker,” he says. “Now you’ve got another one.”
The women he watches over include Kristine, who is a welder who found herself out of work and options. She has a scathing sense of humor, even at her worst. Then there’s Tammy, who pays her disabled parents’ expenses by turning tricks. Her invalid mother complains she’s out of cigarettes; Tammy nonchalantly drops that she’ll solve that by “sucking an extra dick.” Sara is “dopesick” and can’t shake even after her grown kids disown her. Amy is in the brutal throes of crack withdrawal; her animal wails from the back bedroom, barely sounding human. She’ll return to her parents and try to live up to the photos that hang in their home of her in high school, before her fall, when she was known as “Krista.”
These women are rough and resilient and, while self-sufficient, have come to rely on the guy in the RV on the corner and the haven he provides. Sara says she knows he’s a “slimy old man,” but she goes back to him anyway. She’s got nowhere else to go, and she needs a place to even out.
And through it all is Saint Elliott, unflappable and unassuming. He lives in a shithole, but for all intents and purposes, as they say, his heart appears to be pure. He just wants to help.
Sweetheart Deal was originally released in 2022, and its title was the more innocuous sounding Aurora Stories. This gives us a hint about how the project started as an omnibus of life on the streets. Directors Elisa Levine and Gabriel Miller focus in on four sex workers, I’d guess not suspecting that Elliott was the real story. This is Ms. Levine’s first feature. Mr. Miller, who was the cinematographer, died in 2019 before the film’s release.
Sweetheart Deal is shot handheld verité style. The filmmakers are true flies on the wall. Their access to personal conversations is remarkable. Ms. Levine and Mr. Miller’s subjects trust them and are forthright. That they had a bank of footage for what looks to have been a conventional documentary, that they were there at all, was a career-making coincidence. They were ready and had scrupulously documented events when those events took a turn. That’s what makes Sweetheart Deal unforgettable.
The less you know about Sweetheart Deal going into it, the better. A trailer will necessarily steer the viewer. The film sometimes feels voyeuristic, encouraging an unhealthy interest in peoples’ pain (one of those “vulgar ironies” astutely referred to by a character). The narratives that come out of their surveillance are heartbreakingly observed. The proceedings that make up the last half hour seem only too inevitable and yet are riveting.
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Sweetheart Deal. Directed by Elisa Levine and Gabriel Miller. 2022. From Abramorama. In theaters in limited release. 99 minutes.