Lessons for today
Far from being a period piece, Kathryn Bigelow’s drama about the 1967 race riots in Detroit feels depressingly relevant, while Daniel Craig has a blast in Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky
Set during the race riots that erupted on the streets of Detroit in July 1967, Kathryn Bigelow’s new film is an incendiary, complex, unflinching dissection of police brutality, systemic racism and appalling injustice that’s as depressingly relevant as its in-themoment docudrama aesthetic suggests. Kicking off with a contextsetting history lesson – an animated version of artist Jacob Lawrence’s 60 ‘Migration Series’ paintings detailing the de facto segregation that continued unchecked after black Americans moved en masse from the rural South to the industrial North – Detroit wastes no time dropping us into the midst of a city ready to explode. A police raid on an unlicensed bar is the riot-inciting incident that starts the city burning, but it’s not the focus of the movie. Instead Bigelow and her Hurt Locker/
Zero Dark Thirty screenwriter Mark Boal deliver a series of forensic, exposition-free snapshots of the ensuing violence that’s putting everyone on edge and creating scenes in Detroit that resemble the images being beamed in from Vietnam on the nightly news.
This is a place where soldiers patrol the streets, armoured vehicles block the roads and twitching curtains are readily mistaken for non-existent snipers hiding out in tenement blocks. Bigelow – working once again with cinematographer Barry Ackroyd – films it all with a documentarian’s eye for detail, mixing in news clips of President Lyndon B Johnson and Michigan governor George W Romney and using archival footage of police brutality on the streets as templates for her own compositions.
Gradually, though, she starts zeroing in on a few key figures. There’s Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega), a security guard well versed in the daily diplomacy necessary to move through a city in which being black – as one character later puts it – is “almost like having a gun pointed at your face”. There’s Fred Temple (Jacob Latimore) and his musician friend Larry Reed (Algee Smith), a singer with the aboutto-be-signed Motown group The Dramatics. There’s Anthony Mackie’s Vietnam vet, Greene, who’s hanging out with a couple of white girls from Idaho (played by Hannah Murray and Kaitlyn Dever) who seem to be partying in Detroit on the last of their parents’ handouts. Finally there’s a trio of racist cops, led by Will Poulter’s despicable Krauss, an angel-faced bigot who starts the movie shrugging off the news that internal affairs are recommending murder charges against him for shooting an unarmed black civilian. He only gets more hateful as the movie continues.
All these characters converge at the Algiers Motel, a party spot in the west of the city that becomes the scene of one of the most notorious incidents of the riots as Krauss – a fictionalised character based on a real cop – responds with his partners to reports that shots have been fired from the hotel. In their efforts to root out the alleged shooter, they subject the assembled inhabitants to horrific abuse – with fatal consequences for some and life-changing effects for others.
Bigelow’s dramatisation of this is unbearably intense and tough to take; but it’s precisely the dogged nature of the portrayal that makes the film such a powerful indictment of institutionalised racism, both then and now. Largely stripped of perception-colouring backstories (Bigelow, Boal and the cast are masters of economical character development), the characters’ humanity or inhumanity is revealed by their various responses to this situation and the film smartly widens the condemnation of Krauss and his peers to the blindeye-turning authority figures – the National Guard, the State police, Krauss’s colleagues and bosses – who could have put a stop to this but didn’t. If there’s a weakness, it’s the decision to rush through the various investigations and trials that followed, but this doesn’t blunt the overall impact. If anything, the swiftness with which justice is inevitably and depressingly denied feels like a comment on the damaging legacy of a country determined to continually turn away from its history instead of confronting it head on.
Making a welcome return to
Bigelow uses archival footage of police brutality on the streets as templates for her own compositions
directing feature films after a mercifully short-lived hiatus, Steven Soderbergh doubles down on the breezy brilliance that made Magic
Mike, Ocean’s Eleven and Out of Sight such bright spots on the blockbuster landscape with a film that brings summer to a close in effortless style. Reteaming with Channing Tatum for the fourth time, Logan Lucky sees Soderbergh exercise his comedy chops once again with a hillbilly heist film that affectionately satirises and celebrates an American heartland too easily demonised for its broad support of the current president. Not that politics are much on the mind of Jimmy Logan (Tatum). Though hurting financially thanks to a failing economy, he’s got a foolproof plan (emphasis on the foolproof part) to break what’s become something of a family curse by pulling off a daring heist in the middle of a NASCAR race. Teaming up with his onearmed brother Clyde (Adam Driver) and their no-nonsense hairdresser sister Mellie (Riley Keough), Jimmy’s plan – concocted so he can continue to support and have access to his daughter – isn’t slick or hi-tech, but it is ingenious, requiring – among other things – breaking an explosives expert called Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) out of and then back into jail in order to pull it off. As with the Ocean’s movies it’s the camaraderie rather than the crime that’s the selling point and Soderbergh’s cast are a blast, particularly Craig (who’s funny in a way he’s never really been allowed to demonstrate before) and Driver, who gets the film’s biggest laugh as the hapless, handless Clyde. ■