While the riot is covered from its inception following a police raid on an unlicensed drinking establishment in a black neighbourhood, with historical news footage blended effectively with cinematographer Barry Ackroyd's own shaky-cam shots, the film centres upon one key event, the Algiers Motel incident, during which a contingent of police and national guard descended upon a motel while investigating sniper fire in the area, and ended up beating, torturing, and in three cases murdering the young, predominantly black guests found within. Three white officers, along with one black security guard, were later charged over the incident, although none were ever found guilty.
Bigelow treats this event as a microcosm of the wider situation. Her film bubbles slowly towards the siege, keeps the heat up for a rolling boil across the episode, and cools gradually off as the fallout is explored - the lack of justice, the damage done to the families of the victims, and the wounds carried by those who survived. She clearly sees parallels with current instances of police brutality and inner city inequality, and she crafts her film as a didactic indictment against such issues.
In many ways she is successful.
The film is visceral and urgent, shot through with danger, dwelling uncomfortably on pain, and through the motel scenes it is difficult to watch, powerfully so - although perhaps the shaky-cam work puts it a little closer to the feel of modern action thrillers, and their reliance on style over substance, than the material deserves.
The cast are strong. John Boyega is standout as the black security guard among white officers. the film posits that he had nothing to do with the violence, and was instead caught impossibly between sides in the riot - attempting to mollify white police who held all the power while drawing as little attention upon himself as possible, urging black people in the crosshairs to keep their calm, to not answer back, to "survive the night". Distrusted by the cops, accused by his peers of being an Uncle Tom, Boyega plays the character as clear-headed yet conflicted, calm yet scared shitless, and his is the best performance of the film.
Yet the character has no active role in the film. His part makes sense as an observer distanced enough from the trauma to function as the audience's eyes and ears - the fly on the wall - but from a plotting point of view, regardless of how the real event unfolded, there is a narrative vacuum. You want Boyega to be the protagonist, and yet he is not integral; the story would play out the same were he present or not.
More essential to the plot is Larry Reed (another excellent turn, by Algee Smith), singer with up and coming soul group the Dramatics, who is caught up, along with his friend Fred (Jacob Latimore) in the horror when the two seek refuge in the motel to escape the looting.
But where Boyega's character is believable, the two boys are less so, feeling more like placeholders or stereotypes than real people. Larry dreams of fame and making it to the big time with his band, and the friends attempt to chat up girls by the pool, and for me it is all too broad, it lacks specificity and idiosyncrasy, and in these crucial moments when we should be identifying with the characters before tragedy strikes I was instead left feeling distanced.
Likewise with another victim, the ex-serviceman played by Anthony Mackie, and the three white officers, who, although played adroitly by Will Poulter (recently seen in Charlie Brooker's Bandersnatch), Ben O'Toole and Jack Reynor, nonetheless fail to transcend the cliches of the racist movie cop that we have seen so very many times before. The image of O'Toole's sweating, leering face, as he lifts a girl's skirt with the barrel of his shotgun, is one that could have been taken from a thousand films of the past few decades. Grotesque, but unoriginal.
While writing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy famously complained to his editor that his protagonist's obstinate nature was threatening the structure of his novel, fighting against his own will as creator. That is not a problem from which you sense Bigelow suffering. What befalls the characters in Detroit is horrific, yet you never inhabit enough of their inner worlds for their sorrows to become fully real. Shocking and compelling, in the moments of tension, but never quite real.
Detroit is a tough watch, and worth it, but ultimately, for me at least, not as vital as it could have been.
No comments:
Post a Comment