Movie Reaction: Detroit

Formula: Do The Right Thing * Zero Dark Thirty
(This was the toughest formula I've had in a while. The movie is oddly structured and there's not many movies explicitly about riots. The formula I settled on is pretty lame and not very helpful)

It's hard to complain about a film for having ambition. In the current production climate, the biggest releases are controlled by major studios making safe bets. Even when movies turn out pretty good, a lot of the films the studios release are measured with a minimal amount  of risk. Wonder Woman "took a chance" on a female director, but it still had the backing of a DC machine that made mega-hits out of Suicide Squad and Batman vs. Superman off name-recognition alone. Or, surprise hits like Get Out generally carry tiny production budgets. Just about everything at the top of the box office has a safety net built in. That's why the past few weeks have been so refreshing. To get movies like Dunkirk, a non-linear mood-piece about a historical event (WWII) that hit its saturation point in the market decades ago, and Valerian, a major budget foreign indie production that was an oddly personal labor of love from the director, is exciting. Detroit continues the trend in a number of ways. First of all, it's a [hopeful] awards player being released in one of the dead spots on the calendar rather than being saved for the traditional fall season. Second, it's an upstart production company (Annapurna) sidestepping the major studios by self-distributing. Finally, and most importantly for this reaction, the film is Kathryn Bigelow's attempt to capture as much of the story and context of the 1967 Detroit race riots into a single film. For those reasons, I was rooting for the film, and that's why I'm sad when I say that I wasn't a huge fan of the movie.

The broad description of Detroit is that it's the story of the 1967 Detroit riots, but more specifically, it's three stories or acts of varying quality. The film begins as an overview of what caused the riots and what it looked like in the opening days. Some of it is oversimplification, but there are also a lot of details like the sniper panic that directly play into later events. The film does a good job giving this big event a ground-level view and lays the groundwork for the mindset of everyone in the second part of the film. The second - and by far the best - part is a confined story about the events at the Algiers Hotel on the third night of the riots. It's an intimate and nerve-wrecking sequence of police terrorism that leads to the death of several African-Americans. The third part of the film is the legal fallout of those events, told through uninspired news clips and court scenes. It reminded me too much of waiting for Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King to finally end.

My big issue with the film is that it's bloated. Bigelow and writer Mark Boal try to fit too much into the film. If the movie was just the Algiers Hotel sequence, it would be a stressful-to-watch but great real-life horror movie in which Bigelow slowly turns the screws and builds the dread to drive home the point. The rest of the film isn't nearly as well done. The early part is too anonymous. The context it gives for some of the characters who show up at the Algiers Hotel isn't substantial enough to justify the time spent. Most of the final part of the film could've been equally well covered with a little historical disclaimer at the end saying "this happened and this happened".

The film is also more thematically blunt than I care for. Whether it's a character coining #BlueLivesMatter five decades too early or another person asking "How could someone do this to another person?" when one the the beat up victims is discovered, there are too many moments when I wish the filmmaker would've trusted the audience to pick up on the message on their own.

OK, one other thing that is either an issue tied to the central conceit of the film or is simply a matter of logistics that I missed. There's no single story of what happened inside the Algiers Hotel. Naturally, the victims and cops have conflicting stories, and the film sides heavily with the victims, which I prefer. This film isn't Rashomon though. It tells a single account in a definitive way. It's not until the end that it suggests that there's a lot of reading between the lines going on. Again, that's fine by me. However, there's one massive story hole that distracted me throughout. A starter pistol plays a prominent role in all of this, but for some reason, everyone forgets about it during the police raid. The police raid the hotel because they believe someone has a gun in there and ask dozens of times where the gun is. Somehow, every person forgets about this starter pistol during this long and violent interrogation. Now, in real life, this starter pistol was never recovered. So, in a version of this film that was about all the conflicting narratives, it would make sense for the pistol to maybe not come up or be remembered. In short, that's an acceptable inconsistency. In this film, which sticks to a single version, most of the residents of the hotel saw the starter pistol and heard it from the hotel when it was fired then go on to magically forget about it. Yes, the characters are under tremendous duress, but almost all of them have moments of clarity during this too. Someone could've at least mentioned it early and been ignored or something. Anything to address this would've been better than ignoring it for so long. I find this to be such a baffling oversight, that I'm almost convinced I must've missed some critical key detail somewhere explaining why this wasn't brought up until very late.

The performances are a bright spot, especially Algee Smith, who is the closest thing the film has to a main character. He goes through an emotional wringer and comes out of it with the most interesting and complex response to it all. Anthony Mackie doesn't have a lot to do, but he really steps up in the couple scenes he needs to. Hannah Murray (Gilly from Game of Thrones, who I couldn't place how I knew her for the whole movie and it drove me nuts) and Kaitlyn Dever are mostly asked to be scared and degraded with occasional moments of defiance, which they do well. John Boyega is a little tough to rate. He's good in this. His character doesn't always fit though. He is another case of the movie not making sense while telling only a single version of events. Boyega plays a security guard who essentially witnesses what the cops are doing in the hotel as a mostly impartial observer. It's never clear why the cops let him be there or why he left his security post several blocks away to be at the hotel in the first place. In real life, his character was there, so he has to be, but the film never takes the time to explain that. It's another case where the film decides to fill in some blanks then just ignores the ones that don't make sense for its interpretation. And let me reiterate, this film is not presented as a hazy interpretation. It is presented in absolute terms when it's happening. Even if the reason is fabricated or guessed, they needed to come up with more to explain him. Since they don't he spends most scenes in the background acting like he's green-screened in, Forrest Gump style. He's only there because he has to be according to actual events. He's written into the story as little as possible. Will Poulter has the role that I assume will be the most talked about. He's the racist cop who is in charge of everything happening in the hotel. He really should've grown a mustache so he could twirl it. He's a villain, not a character. In other words, he's not very interesting. He plays the character with zeal. In fact, he's so good at being vile that I worry he might become typecast in the future. That character is a little too emblematic of racism though. Instead of being a story of systemic prejudice that allows for a domino effect of tragic events to occur, it becomes the story of the one bad egg cop who gives the others a bad name. I don't think that was the intent.

The only reason I have some many issues with the movie is because it's so ambitious. Movies I like much less, that are much more-straightforward and lazy I have trouble coming up with anything to say at all. I'm much more interested in a film that wildly swings for a home run than one that bunts in hope of getting a single. Kathryn Bigelow is one of the best working directors that I know of, and her direction, especially in the middle portion of the film, nearly makes up for what doesn't. The performances are much better than the characters they are attached too. On a mid-level budget the production team does a solid job recreating the period setting. Basically, a lot of very talented people do a lot of good work on a film that just isn't fully realized.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend