Greg Kwedar (2023)

Greg Kwedar’s drama is being received with widespread respectful enthusiasm – it’s a prime example of a film whose set-up and subject tend to disarm criticism.  The percentage of Black prisoners in American jails is shockingly disproportionate:  Blacks currently comprise 13% of the total US population and 37% of the country’s prisoners[1].  Most of these prisoners are male; most of the characters in Sing Sing are Black men doing time in the notorious jail for which the movie is named.  These characters are participating in Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), an actual programme that has been running since 1996 at Sing Sing (whose full official name, noted on screen in the opening titles, is Sing Sing Correctional Facility (Maximum Security Prison)).  Several members of Kwedar’s cast are former Sing Sing prisoners and RTA alumni.  Sing Sing is based on a true story in a more meaningful sense than use of that phrase normally implies.  Yet so much of what Kwedar has put on screen rings false.

The early stages are nothing if not thought-provoking – confused would be another way of describing them.  The protagonist, John ‘Divine G’ Whitfield (Colman Domingo), on stage and in costume, delivers Lysander’s ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’ speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and makes an oddly solemn job of it.  I suspect Colman Domingo’s voice cracks with emotion and his eyes fill with tears simply to make clear Divine G’s unhappy plight in Sing Sing – unless they’re also meant to explain why, when the RTA group gets to discussing what their next production will be, someone suggests doing comedy for a change.  Did the group cut the ‘rude mechanicals’ from their version of the Dream (even though the Pyramus and Thisbe debacle might seem just the job for them)?  Or is the idea just that Shakespeare is Shakespeare and like-heavy-bro?  Approached by Divine G about getting involved in RTA, another prisoner, Divine Eye (Clarence Maclin), quotes ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools’ from King Lear; in the next scene, Divine Eye dismisses RTA as a waste of time; the scene after that, he’s in the group and the one pushing for a comedy.  Most of the other men like that idea; Divine G, supposedly the star performer, is an exception.  So the group’s (white) director, Brent Buell (Paul Raci), devises Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, a time-travelling concoction mostly comic but – presumably to accommodate Divine G – including Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’.  Despite his wanting to do comedy, Divine Eye chooses to audition for Hamlet, up against Divine G.  It’s not clear if he does this to rile Divine G and, if so, why; or why Brent casts Divine Eye as the Prince of Denmark (we don’t see the audition); or what Divine G feels about that.  By the way, I sat through the whole film unsure if, but guessing that, Brent was a theatre director working in prisons rather than a prisoner himself[2].

Sing Sing is an original screenplay (credited to Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar, Clarence Maclin and John Whitfield) but you’d be forgiven for assuming it’s adapted from a theatre piece.  There are occasional exterior shots – to indicate that the world beyond the jail is unattainable for those inside it.  There are a few sequences in prison cells and one in a room where Divine G has his latest parole interview.  But the action mostly takes place on, in effect, a single, extended set – the space where the RTA group meets and rehearses, and the hall where their performances are held.  The larger prison context is intentionally negligible.  It comprises a single drugs transaction in the prison yard and a twenty-second scene in the communal TV room – included only to show Divine G unable to join in with the other men’s laughter at the comedy they’re watching:  this is because Mike Mike (Sean San José), a mixed-race fellow-member of RTA, has just committed suicide in the cell next door to Divine G’s.  There’s next to no interaction between the main characters and prisoners not on the RTA programme.  Kwedar is concerned exclusively with the healing, humanising potential of creative endeavour for men in otherwise miserable circumstances.  (The prison’s name obviously also has pun potential, and although the RTA doesn’t seem to extend to musicals, it is meant to give participants something to celebrate.)  Thanks to plenty of gruelling-to-watch prison dramas over the years, I can’t pretend not to be somewhat grateful for Kwedar’s sanitised picture of incarceration.  But ‘real and raw’ – the summary description of Sing Sing from one of the many admiring reviews on Rotten Tomatoes – is just what this film is not.

Sing Sing, rather, exploits several strands of reality in order to assert authenticity.  The reality of the statistics quoted in the first paragraph of this note.  The fact that the main characters are based on real people or are those people:  while John ‘Divine G’ Whitfield is played by an already high-profile actor, Clarence ‘Divine Eye’ Maclin is playing himself – as are Jon-Adrian ‘JJ’ Velazquez, David ‘Dap’ Giraudy, Patrick ‘Preme’ Griffin and Sean ‘Dino’ Johnson.  The film also makes use of a well-founded public perception that numerous Black prisoners in the US are victims of miscarriages of justice.  JJ Velazquez was one:  according to Wikipedia, Velazquez is ‘an American criminal legal reform activist who was wrongfully convicted of a 1998 murder of a retired police officer’ and served more than twenty-three years of his twenty-five-year sentence before being granted clemency.  A Google search on John ‘Divine G’ Whitfield suggests he also was wrongly convicted of murder and Wikipedia’s plot synopsis immediately describes Divine G as ‘incarcerated … for a crime he did not commit’.  The film doesn’t trouble to explain the details of this injustice, though.  During his parole interview, Divine G wells up as he tells the panel chair (Sharon Washington) about his ‘accident’, which preceded the crime that landed him in Sing Sing, but that’s about it.  The lack of information about Velazquez’s case isn’t a big deal – he’s a minor character in the film’s story – but Divine G is a different matter.

It’s more than a decade now since Paolo and Vittorio Taviani made their fascinating Caesar Must Die (2012), in which actual convicts in Rome’s Rebibbia Prison perform Julius Caesar.   This is docu-drama of an unusual, and unusually authentic, kind but I found even in Caesar Must Die that ‘the longer you watch the men, the more they are performers – and more remarkable when they’re inhabiting characters in Shakespeare than when they’re pretending to be themselves’.  In Sing Sing the cast members who really served time in the prison are pretending to be themselves nearly all the time – and pretending as much as the likes of Colman Domingo, Paul Raci and Sean San José are pretending.  The dynamic between the two groups here is very different from, say, Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020), where Frances McDormand blended seamlessly with the real people on the screen.  Colman Domingo may win an Oscar for his efforts in Sing Sing, as McDormand did for Nomadland, although his performance is nowhere near as skilful.  But it doesn’t need to be, in terms of integrating with the as-themselves contingent in the cast.  To a much greater extent than their counterparts in Nomadland, they’ve been encouraged to act rather than be themselves, as if to show that RTA experience hasn’t been wasted (even though only one of those concerned, according to their IMDb profiles, had done any screen acting before Sing Sing[3]).  This isn’t to say they’re not sometimes compelling:  Clarence Maclin has an especially strong bit when Divine Eye, unexpectedly granted parole, contemplates the prospect with a kind of dazed apprehension.  It does mean, though, that the undoubtedly talented cast seems to be engaged in an acting exercise not only when Brent Buell asks the group to imagine and describe their ideal place, a friend they’ve not seen in ages etc – but throughout.

Despite its distinctive core theme, Sing Sing often feels formulaic – in, for example, Divine G’s heart-to-heart with Divine Eye that breaks the ice and helps the latter to believe he can act, the suicide, Divine G’s bound-to-fail parole application and meltdown during the dress rehearsal for Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code (which leads to a mirror heart-to-heart:  this time Divine Eye gives Divine G renewed hope).  Bryce Dressner’s music for the film, alternating routinely between tragic strings and hopeful piano tinkles, contributes to the formula, too.  In the finale, once a montage of clips of RTA productions is over, Sing Sing reverts to more generic prison-drama uplift.  Divine G eventually gets parole; when he leaves the prison, Divine Eye is waiting outside to meet him; as they drive away, Divine G feels, through the open car window, the breeze of freedom blowing on his face … I ended up finding the film embarrassing but embarrassment may return as irritation if, as predicted, there are plenty of clips of Sing Sing to watch again during the forthcoming movie awards season.

12 September 2024

[1] According to (August 2024) figures on the Prison Policy Initiative website – https://www.prisonpolicy.org/.

[2] The guess was right.  IMDb describes Brent Buell as ‘a playwright, producer, director and novelist … For ten years, Buell directed theater in New York’s maximum-security prisons …’  He’s also one of Sing Sing’s co-producers.

[3] Patrick Griffin played ‘Chinook Co-Pilot’ in Lone Survivor (2013).