TV Reviews : ‘Doing Time’: Little News From the Big House

On the short list of qualities we tend to expect from documentaries, point of view is surely high up the roster. So it’s oddly unsettling to watch Alan and Susan Raymond’s intimate look inside Lewisburg Federal Prison, “Doing Time: Life Inside the Big House” (tonight at 10 pon HBO, with repeats Sunday, Feb. 21, 25 and 27).

As they did with the Loud family in their epochal “An American Family,” the Raymonds’ camera wanders everywhere, and yet their perspective on life behind bars never comes through.

Or never intrudes, depending on the viewer’s point of view. If “Doing Time” was designed to present us with the raw data of the dynamics that run a high-security federal prison, then leave us to decide whether such intensive incarceration is appropriate, it works very well. Taken in this way, the film seems to follow in documentarian Robert Flaherty’s tradition of artful reportage (Alan Raymond’s camera moves menacingly in tandem to Patrick O’Hearn’s dark music).

But there is also the unavoidable feeling that the Raymonds became intimidated by their subject. Clips of wild, vibrant and slightly crazy prisoner interviews are interspersed with dull, straight talk from the Lewisburg staff, but there is little that is vitally new about prisons here.

Guards and inmates come off as specimens behind glass, held at arm’s length. One can only wonder if this was for the Raymonds’ safety, or by design.