Kathryn Bigelow (2017)
The racially charged Detroit Riot was precipitated by a police raid on a ‘blind pig’ – an unlicensed, after-hours bar – on the city’s Near West Side in the early hours of 23 July 1967. The police, most if not all of them white, decided to arrest everyone in the bar, whose clientele was exclusively African-American. While the arrests were going on, a crowd of onlookers gathered in the street, stones were thrown, and the Riot began. (It continued for the best part of five days.) With order breaking down, the state governor (George W Romney: Mitt’s father) brought in the Michigan National Guard and army paratroopers to support the civil authorities and emergency services. The Algiers Motel incident occurred, a mile or so east of where the rioting started, during the night of 25-26 July. Triggered by reports that snipers had been seen at or near the motel, the incident resulted in three black male teenagers being killed by police. A further nine people – seven black males and two white females – were beaten or verbally abused by members of a riot task force that included city and state police and National Guard officers. Charges of felonious assault, conspiracy, murder, and conspiracy to commit civil rights abuse were filed against three officers and one private security guard. The four were found not guilty on all charges.
The trailer announces that Detroit is ‘BASED ON THE TRUE STORY … BEHIND ONE OF THE MOST TERRIFYING EVENTS … IN AMERICAN HISTORY’. (Those latter words are a bold claim, considering the stiff competition.) Less emphatic text on the screen at the end of Kathryn Bigelow’s account of the Algiers Motel incident and its aftermath acknowledges that, because the full facts of what occurred have never been conclusively established, the film has included some pieces of ‘dramatization’ based on individual witness statements etc. There’s more than a tonal disparity between the hyped-up preview and the sober postscript. We expect and often accept dramatic licence in films about historical events but to invoke, in prospect, ‘THE TRUE STORY’ and admit, in retrospect, that in this case that’s a relative term, is slippery. Although we’re not meant to judge a film by its trailer, I think it’s not unfair to do so with Detroit. Kathryn Bigelow could have chosen to include her disclaimer at the start. Instead, she stages the horrors in and around the motel with a gruesome realism that’s designed to make the audience feel that what’s on the screen must be ‘true’. Bigelow slips in her caveat as if as an afterthought – emotional and political mission already accomplished.
There’s no argument that people involved in the Algiers Motel lockdown died or suffered bodily abuse and psychological damage, and that most of them were African Americans. One of the people in the wrong place at the wrong time is Greene (Anthony Mackie), a Vietnam War veteran, whose presence serves as a continuing reminder that the blind pig gathering that sparked the riots was a welcome-home party for two black GIs back from Vietnam. As well as sharpening the movie as a piece of history, the racial element also resonates with more recent cases of racist police brutality in the US and thereby achieves urgent political relevance. (Perhaps unintentionally, Detroit carries an echo of censure too of the American invasion of Iraq: the alleged snipers outside the motel are, according to the film, a chimera – a human equivalent of Saddam Hussein’s WMD.) The racism in evidence is appalling and enraging both as a social phenomenon and in the detail of its physical consequences that Kathryn Bigelow graphically describes. Yet the conspicuous cinematic technique of Detroit – the juddering hand-held camerawork and dynamic editing – is partly counterproductive. The police interrogation in the motel occupies the bulk of the running time of this overlong (143-minute) film. Like Christopher Nolan in Dunkirk, Bigelow aims to immerse the viewer in the action; as with Dunkirk, you’re so conscious of the director’s intentions that style threatens to dominate substance, especially since few of the characters emerge strongly as individuals. They are, rather, figures in an extended, grim reconstruction.
A signal exception to this is Philip Krauss (Will Poulter), the vilest and most vigorous of the three patrolmen – and a character who illustrates another weakness of the film. Krauss subjects some of the suspects to mock executions so as to frighten others into confessing that they were snipers – this culminates in the death of Aubrey (Nathan Davis Jr), when Krauss’s less naturally aggressive colleague Demens (Jack Reynor) somehow misunderstands the rules of the ‘game’, and thinks he’s meant to shoot Aubrey for real. Krauss is so much the focus of evil racism – and so dominant in the action – that, as not infrequently happens in racial dramas (The Help, for example), it’s a nasty individual rather than a social system that seems to be the problem. Of course, a violent, verging-on-psychotic personality like Krauss often is the actual problem – the channel through which systemic viciousness is realised. But Bigelow sacrifices context in favour of immediacy and the screenwriter Mark Boal (who also wrote The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty) supplies Krauss with a disproportionate number of lines. It’s not Will Poulter’s fault that he’s too much but the emphasis on Krauss skews the moral picture – and the film’s political message.
The most successful character in Detroit is Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega), the black security guard hired to protect a nearby grocery store during the rioting and who at first ingratiates himself with the police and other officers. He has an advantage in that Dismukes is expected to be relatively quiet and watchful during the mayhem but John Boyega is such a strong presence that you almost wish Bigelow and Boal had told the story from the security guard’s point of view. This would no doubt have created other difficulties – it seems that Dismukes’s actions in the motel are among the most disputed elements of what went on there – but it might have made for more complex drama. After being identified as present in the Algiers by one of the young women (Hannah Murray) caught up in the incident, Dismukes is charged with murder and stands trial with the patrolmen. Boyega is especially good in these post-motel scenes. One of the film’s most telling and persuasive moments comes when, at the end of the trial, Dismukes leaves the courthouse and, with a mixture of disgust and relief, throws up in a corner of the street. After doing so, he looks up anxiously, as if checking he’s not going to be arrested again – as a black man vomiting in a public place.
There’s an inevitable lessening of tension once the horrors inside the Algiers Motel are at end. This is a relief for the viewer but it’s hard to ignore the abrupt switch into a more conventional style of movie – as Bigelow describes the tragic aftermath for those directly affected and the bereaved families, the attitudes of police and judiciary, the incredulous reactions of the African Americans watching in the courtroom. (The dialogue is presumably taken verbatim from the trial transcript.) John Krasinski does a skilful job as the police officers’ defence attorney and Detroit is well acted generally but, except in the case of Dismukes, the script tends to be awkward whenever it aims for more than very basic characterisation. This is true not just with Krauss but also with Larry Reed (Algee Smith), lead singer with the R&B group The Dramatics, who were in the motel during a visit to Detroit to try and seal a new recording contract. That awkwardness is symptomatic: Kathryn Bigelow is persistently uncomfortable in this film in negotiating between quasi-documentary and dramatic storytelling, and insists too much on the veracity of what she’s showing. The final reality check on the afterlife of the characters is only to be expected. More surprising and jarring is the insertion, as a brief entr’acte between the motel coverage and what came in its wake, of several black-and-white photographs of the Detroit Riot – proof positive, Bigelow seems to be reminding us, that her story is TRUE.
5 September 2017
