Kathryn Bigelow sheds fresh light on the tragedy of ‘Detroit’
Tucked behind a sleepy tree-lined road, David Senak’s home gives the impression of suburban peace. A welcome flag hangs from the window. The garden is well-tended. On a recent afternoon, young neighbors were having a lacrosse catch.
But the idyll conceals a roiling past. Senak is a symbol of law enforcement run amok. And his bid at a life of quiet anonymity — made clear via a door-slam by a companion when a reporter came knocking — may be reaching an end.
Fifty years ago, the former Detroit policeman led a contingent that, according to eyewitness testimony, rounded up, intimidated, beat and shot an innocent group of mainly African Americans during the city’s 1967 civil unrest. The ordeal at the Algiers Motel left three young men dead and many others battered. Senak and his fellow cops never served any jail time, and the incident was little-known outside Detroit. In recent years he has led a nondescript life in a predominantly white middle-class community about 45 minutes outside the city.
But the secrecy is now melting away thanks to a jolting new movie from Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker,” “Zero Dark Thirty.”)
Titled “Detroit,” the film takes those events and, with a character played by young
British actor Will Poulter and renamed Philip Krauss, gives new expression to Senak and his cohorts’ actions.
Kathryn Bigelow infuses that summer night with the urgent viscerality of her overseas war films and the racial boldness of early-era Spike Lee. At a moment of national division — between the working and the wealthy, between Black and Blue Lives Matter movements — “Detroit” pushes us in a new direction. It not only offers a fresh read on a familiar sadness but reprograms the way cinema can process tragedy.
By portraying an all-American city that has repeatedly failed to bridge racial divides, where wealth and poverty are sharply delineated by neighborhood and neighborhood by color, the film has an impact greater than its scope. “Detroit” not only illuminates the police-minority dynamic in a Midwestern city circa 1967 — it sheds light on everywhere else right now.
Re-teaming with her longtime screenwriter Mark Boal, Bigelow starts the story at the beginning: A hopeful African American migration from the South to Detroit soon yields to economic despair, segregated geography and frayed relations with a mostly white police force. The riot/rebellion is seen in this context; when the first items are taken from a store on July 23, it comes off not as wanton looting but as the pipe-burst of decades of backed-up resentment.
The movie soon arcs to the early hours of July 26 as told by comprehensive, if at times competing, accounts in court proceedings, newspaper stories, police reports and (more loosely, as rights were not sold) a book from Pulitzer-winner John Hersey. Essentially on that evening, three white policemen — characters based on the 23-year-old Senak as well as the now-deceased Ronald August and Robert Paille — storm the annex after gunshots are said to be coming from its direction.
There they impose a reign of terror on about a half-dozen black men and two white women in a putative search for a gun. (None was ever found.) Also present, and morally conflicted, is the black security guard, Melvin Dismukes, played by John Boyega.
The scarring runs deep even for those who survive. That includes an honored Vietnam veteran named Greene, based on the real-life Robert Greene, who’d come to Detroit from Kentucky looking for work (Anthony Mackie); a bandmate of Temple’s in Motown act the Dramatics named Cleveland Larry Reed (Algee Smith); and two women from Ohio, Julie Hysell (Hannah Murray) and Karen Malloy (Kaitlyn Dever), staying at the Algiers.
The spot where the Algiers stood is just an overgrown field now, one more hollowed-out space in a neighborhood that has fallen on hard times. There is not even a plaque.
Bigelow would visit this site often in preproduction, even as she wound up shooting in Massachusetts for tax reasons. “It gave us grounding. I would just come here with the art department or the camera department and bring it all to life in my head. It’s hallowed ground, really.”