‘Crown Heights’ bores instead of provoking anger
False testimony. A wrongful conviction. An innocent man spending over 20 years in prison. A flawed system that aims to keep him there. A friend who’ll stop at nothing to exonerate him. The raw material of “Crown Heights,” a biographical drama based on the shamefully true story of Colin Warner, is the stuff great films are made of. But “Crown Heights” is soul-shaking only in the abstract. In execution, it’s deathly dull.
Less than 10 minutes into the film, before we’re given a chance to know him, 18-year-old Colin (Lakeith Stanfield) is arrested for a murder he didn’t commit. Born in Trinidad, the Brooklyn immigrant gets a swift lesson in American justice. With nothing beyond uncorroborated eyewitness testimony to convict him, bloodthirsty prosecutors eager to rack up convictions easily secure a guilty verdict.
Thus begins a nightmare that spans two decades. Behind bars, Colin faces dehumanizing conditions and conduct. Ineptitude, corruption, prison politics and institutional racism make a hell of Colin’s constrained life. But Colin never breaks, not even when the carrot of parole is dangled in front of him. In order to achieve it he’d have to express remorse, and he refuses to do so for a crime he didn’t commit.
Stanfield, given little to work with, nevertheless delivers a moving performance. He plays Colin – a slight, heavyeyed man who looks like he would shatter in prison – with a quiet inner resolve that preserves his sanity as the years tick inexorably by. But for all of Stanfield’s depth, “Crown Heights” is distressingly uninterested in exploring Colin’s psyche. Because Colin’s character is granted no interiority, we feel no true sense of loss, and he serves as little more than a black body upon which white institutional horrors are visited.
Instead the film focuses on bureaucracy and procedure, as behind the scenes Colin’s lifelong friend Carl King (Nnamdi Asomugha) exhausts every avenue for securing his friend’s freedom. His fealty and sacrifice should be moving, but as with Colin, Carl is given little interior life. Rather, an inexplicable amount of “Crown Heights” is devoted to watching people pore over paperwork.
While its intentions are admirable, “Crown Heights” is less a fully-fleshed narrative than it is an outrage generator, railing against the soft target of a flawed judicial system. It certainly deserves the criticism, but next time with more attention devoted to the lives destroyed and less to process servers.