Detroit

Detroit is the latest addition to Kathryn Bigelow's lengthy filmography and it is the most Bigelow-esque film you'd come to expect from her. The film displays raw realism with the actors looking very real and naked from their famous personas. The story is jam packed and while I think this source material would have made a much better miniseries, Bigelow makes the story work with sacrificing some facts for the sake of cinema. The big question is: is it as good as the critics say it is? The answer: No. Not Close. But with that being said, it is a damn good movie that is definitely worth seeing.

Telling the story of three murdered African American men in a motel in Detroit during the city's infamous riots and civil rights movement, Detroit stars an all star cast that is certainly better on paper than they are in this film. John Boyega, Will Poulter, Jason Mitchell, Anthony Mackie, John Krasinski, and on and on-but none of them are really served as a main character. Bigelow is so determined on telling the facts of the case that she sacrifices good performances in order to give us a slice of reality. The film plays out like the most expensive reenactment of a tragedy on Investigation Discovery and, when looking at the facts of the case, this is the best compliment I can give the film. It sounds back handed but it is extremely informative even if it is picking a side in all of it. The one thing Bigelow does best is showing a true story like it is unfolding in front of you. She does it brilliantly in The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, but Detroit is where it is to a fault.

With a 140-plus minute running time and a gaggle of characters to keep track of, the story is just too big for a feature film and requires patience. Despite this, Kathryn Bigelow does her best to tame Mark Boal's bloated script to a digestible film and the results are mostly good. The performances from the actors are real, raw and authentic in every aspect but never enough to burst off the screen. Bigelow lets the events unfold and do that for them. Overall, Detroit is certainly a good film in need of an audience just a very patient one.

The facts, not alternative facts but the facts. Once you have that then the artist comes and tells us, dramatizes, enlightens without distorting the facts. I was sweating when Detroit ended but I needed to go back and check the historical records of the events. The movie is a faithful depiction of the facts with the artistic eye of the amazing Kathryn Bigelow to illustrate them. The film will make you mad, it will desolate you and anger you and force you as an American to ask yourself, how can this possibly be? Detroit as an artistic venture is a marvel with a cast of fantastic actors. Bravo!

As the first film to be distributed and released by Annapurna, Detroit tells the story about what happened during the 1967 riots, specifically the one in Detroit that put the city on the map and drove the population down from its highs back when Detroit was the Motor City. The acting, direction, music, and pace of this movie is well done and should've gotten Oscar love.

The poster of Annapurna's newest film, Detroit hangs at my local theater like a provocation. A thin blue line of police officers struggles to hold back angry black protesters as big bold letters are scrawled along the side. The tagline reads: "It's time we knew." Those words, along with the required "from the creators of..." accolades are the only things on the poster that aren't sideways.

They might as well be though, considering the 1967 Detroit riot is about the only thing about Detroit most Americans know. And I'm sad to report that while the film does a good job of filling the screen with a few powerful moments, it never provides much insight into the "untold" story of the Motor City or how its story fits into the larger context of modern racial relations.

After an awkward Jacob Lawrence inspired history of the Great Migration, the film captures the precipitating actions of police that turned the city's long sitting racial resentments into a lit tinderbox. In a hybrid of dramatization and archival footage, Detroit then glosses over the actions taken by the state to subdue tensions before setting its sights on a host of singular stories. It becomes high noon at the Algiers Motel where unarmed black teens face off against white police and National Guardsmen. Then comes the trial.

All of these events could have been their own movies and delved into deeper depths as to the cause, devastation, aftermath and public perception of what was later dubbed the black days of July. Yet because Mark Boal's screenplay is so laser-focused on documented events and momentary minutia, everything is squished into an off-kilter collage of well-meaning but superficial docudrama. One whose central story, the Algiers Motel incident, is treated more like a genre horror film than either a granular traumatic event or police brutality in microcosm.

Detroit basically pulls a Dunkirk (2017), building unbelievable tension while giving us the bear minimum in character. It's all about the situation and the situation only. The recreation of which is beyond reproach. However, Detroit's grand design creates a narrative dissonance. One in which the individual experiences of real people just don't translate all that well.

The problem is compounded further by Barry Ackroyd's unvarnished cinematography which cuts between extreme closeups of wounded faces, voyeuristic overheads and wide shots of crowds angrily gathering in the streets. The lack of establishing shots, aerials, use of recognizable landmarks etc. hammers home the idea that something like this can happen anywhere. But the question, why can it happen anywhere, remains illusive up until we here the words "police criminality should be treated the same as criminality." By then it's too little too late.

Luckily director Kathryn Bigelow is very adept at inserting humanity within the margins saving Detroit from being just another Patriot's Day (2016). She finds a particularly redemptive subject in Algee Smith as up-and-coming Motown singer Larry Reed. The young actor displays an emotional intelligence well beyond his years, formulating a character that starts out with youthful swagger, ends with a shaken core, putting you in his head-space at all points in-between. Additionally, while most of the films attempts to color opposing forces with shades of grey fall flat, Reed's arc feels tragic but sadly understandable given the circumstance.

Unfortunately for both Bigelow and the city of Detroit, Detroit's script casts too wide a net to be especially impacting. It's procedural approach stifles the emotional stakes and its over-arching theme is turned in with much less humanity and passion than is deserved. Even with a towering performance by Algee, and the inclusion of Will Poulter who plays menacing/in-over-his-head real well, Detroit just can't transcends its trappings. To add insult to injury, the film itself was shot primarily in Boston...so there's that...

This movie has a very intense pace. It's a story who had to be told and I believe that Directress Bigelow does it very well. In every frame there is something interesting going on and some kind of challenge. This gives a special feeling of how terrible things were at the time. I just have some trouble with the characters depth because it never really fleshes out the characters. Also some characters appear in a certain cliché way. You care and feel for them through the visual atrocities and because of the rejection of racism but not because you like the character on an emotional level. If you want to see a movie with a point of view and want to be emotionally moved then this is for you.