Let it Fall
Bursting with humanity and insight, the brilliant documentary “Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992” couldn’t be more timely, reconstructing the events that led to the Rodney King verdict and to the racial conflagrations that shook Los Angeles and the rest of the country.
Director John Ridley, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “12 Years a Slave,” begins his film a decade before a jury acquitted four police officers who had been captured on video repeatedly beating a defenseless King.
It’s 1982, and South Central Los Angeles is rife with gangs and drugs, a dire situation that’s killing many innocent people, a horror show that seems to go unnoticed in the rest of the city. The police respond with a sketchy choke-hold policy designed to combat violent suspects, but that only leads to more unnecessary deaths. Meanwhile, tensions between the Korean and African American communities are coming to a boil, with multiple slayings of Korean store owners and the fatal shooting of an African American girl over a bottle of orange juice, a case that results only in probation for a Korean shop owner.
By the time we get to the Rodney King beating in 1991, it’s no wonder that the city has become a racial tinderbox, though it’s no less tragic and haunting when all hell breaks loose in the streets after the four police officers are exonerated.
What makes the astoundingly edited “Let It Fall” so powerful is that it’s an oral history, told through many angles: residents, police officers, victims, families of the victims, witnesses, jurors and a host of others. In another clever stroke, Ridley doesn’t specify the historical role of these folks until it’s absolutely necessary — a move that often challenges our assumptions about where everyone is coming from.
Most important, Ridley allows all his interview subjects to come off as human beings, whatever their flaws and strengths. There are no judgments or easy answers here, just a complex racial dialogue that remains eerily resonant today. It’s one of the best films of the year.