Elegance Bratton (2022)
The Inspection announces itself as ‘inspired by true events’; those events are from the life of its writer-director, whose first dramatic cinema feature this is. Elegance Bratton was born in New Jersey in 1979. At the age of sixteen, he came out as gay and was kicked out of home. He drifted for a decade before joining the US Marines: after basic training, he transferred in 2005 to the Marine Corps’ Combat Camera Unit, which trained him in film-making and photography. (He left the Marines to study at Columbia. He has since made several shorts, a TV series and a documentary feature.) At the start of The Inspection, Ellis French (Jeremy Pope) gets out of bed in a homeless shelter in Trenton, New Jersey and visits his estranged mother – to get the birth certificate he needs to enlist in the Marines. Most of the remaining action takes place at boot camp on Parris Island, South Carolina. The film ends in 2005, when Ellis successfully completes his training and meets again with his mother, Inez (Gabrielle Union). Knowing in advance that the protagonist is Bratton’s alter ego makes the boot camp scenes a bit less hard to stomach: we can rest assured that Ellis will survive the physical and verbal abuse to which he’s subjected, much of it homophobic, and come through. It’s the persisting central importance in the story of Inez – and our presupposition that she’s based on Bratton’s own mother, to whom The Inspection is dedicated, in the closing credits – that proves more of a problem.
Although they don’t get easier to watch, the rigours and ritual humiliations of military training – especially the victimisation of recruits the drill instructor and other thugs take against – are familiar enough on the cinema screen. Black and gay, Ellis is a potentially distinctive victim on the grounds of ethnicity and sexuality but only the latter really counts. The bellowing drill sergeant, Laws (Bokeem Woodbine), is himself African-American: his cultural prejudice, at the height of the War on Terror, is directed chiefly at Ismail (Eman Esfandi), the one Muslim in the small training unit. Ellis’s gayness – in what was also the era of the US military’s ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ (DADT) policy – is another matter. The rote questions barked out at the new arrivals include ‘Are you now or have you ever been a homosexual?’ and Ellis yells back no, though it’s plain to see Laws doesn’t believe the answer. In the showers, Ellis has an erection and is beaten up by others in the unit. I didn’t understand a short sequence that Bratton inserts just before this mayhem kicks off: Ellis appears to imagine the other recruits undressed, in a different location, giving him the come-on. Generating a sexual fantasy while they’re actually naked in the showers together seems a bad moment for Ellis to choose – why would he need to anyway, in order to be aroused? But from this point on, Ellis is a marked and bullied man.
Autobiographical it may be but The Inspection often seems the work of a seasoned moviegoer rather than of someone who suffered the particular treatment meted out to Ellis French. For example, Laws and the other drill sergeant, Rosario (Raúl Castillo), are a well-tried chalk-and-cheese double act (their forerunners in military cinema include the cynical and idealistic sergeants, played by Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe respectively, in Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986)). From the start, in contrast to the unyielding Laws, Rosario keeps a benignly watchful, if not always an effectively protective, eye on Ellis. The young man’s worried his mother hasn’t replied to his letters; he begs to borrow Rosario’s phone to call her at work to check she’s OK, and Rosario uneasily agrees. The sergeant proves he has his own personal problems and is emotionally vulnerable in a phone call to his wife that Ellis happens to overhear. Each of these episodes has a standard-issue feel. The only exchange between them that doesn’t, comes late on when Ellis sees Rosario showering alone, approaches him, and the sergeant anxiously warns him off. Again, I didn’t get why Ellis seemed to be asking for trouble (and so near to graduation into the Marine Corps). Even if Bratton is advancing the legitimate argument that DADT was essentially homophobic and unjustly prevented gay members of the military from expressing themselves, his means of illustrating the point are puzzling.
Things improve for Ellis in the home straight of his training. Harvey (McCaul Lombardi), the nastiest of his fellow trainees, is exposed for what he is. During target practice, Harvey (forename Laurence!) falsely claims that Ellis has scored much lower than he really has. There may be other homophobes in the unit but the rest of them seem to recognise the need for fair play. In the ‘Crucible’ exercise that culminates their training, the Marines-to-be have to paint their faces. Seeing Ellis, Laws exclaims, ‘What the entire fuck, French! How did you manage to fag up something as simple as war paint?’ To which Ellis loudly replies, ‘Sir! This recruit does not know how to not piss you off, sir!’ This is a genuinely funny exchange (it got a well-deserved laugh in the BFI Flare Festival audience) but it’s also the standout instance of The Inspection’s presenting military homophobia as somehow more innocuous once Ellis has got to grips with it.
Scaling down the abuse he receives in boot camp is also designed to foreground Inez French’s enduring inability to accept her son’s sexuality. At the start, when Ellis tells his mother he’s enlisting in the Marines, she laughs derisively; handing over his birth certificate, she tells Ellis that, unless he reverts to being ‘the son I gave birth to’, he should ‘consider this certificate void’. A devout Christian, who works as a prison officer, Inez doesn’t expect Ellis to complete the training; when, thanks to Rosario, he makes phone contact, her immediate reaction to hearing his voice is ‘They’ve thrown you out’. (Given her attitude, let alone their longstanding estrangement, it’s hard to see why Ellis is surprised that Inez hasn’t been answering his letters.) She turns up at the passing-out ceremony, sees Ellis in the line-up and weeps with joy. He treats her to lunch in the restaurant where other new Marines celebrate with their families; she disparages the food but enthuses about her son now having his pick of the girls who, Inez says, will be queuing up for him. Frustrated but determinedly pleasant, Ellis replies that boot camp hasn’t turned him straight. Inez instantly flies into a rage so vociferous that Laws intervenes: in the brief dialogue that follows, the hard-bitten drill sergeant is a spokesman for liberal-minded moderation compared with the mother. She and Ellis have a further showdown, in a somewhat more private area of the restaurant; she reminds him she gave birth to him when she was sixteen and unmarried, and could easily have abandoned him as a baby. Ellis tells his mother he’ll never give up on her but they part on bad terms, as far as she’s concerned.
Jeremy Pope had a small role in Regina King’s One Night in Miami (2020) and appeared in the TV series Hollywood and Pose but is best known to date for his work on stage. He’s a compelling screen presence, however: as Ellis, he creates a real force field, without recourse to histrionics. Pope is especially good at limning the character’s self-control. He’s by far the best thing in The Inspection though he doesn’t fully conceal its weaknesses. It’s a relief to watch knowing things will work out all right for Ellis/Elegance yet this also has the effect – in conjunction with the rites-of-passage mechanics of the piece – of neutralising Bratton’s portrait of what Laws describes to a fellow officer as the business of making ‘monsters’. Perhaps because he already knows the answer himself, the writer-director doesn’t bother to explain why joining the Marines is Ellis’s only escape route from living as a down-and-out. (He has friends: we see him saying goodbye to them before he visits his mother at the start but they’re never seen or spoken of again.) And just about everything to do with Inez feels overdone, including Gabrielle Union’s playing of her. Justifying himself in his mother’s eyes drives Ellis and seems to be what drove Elegance Bratton to make The Inspection. His own mother died shortly before it went into production, which may well have intensified Bratton’s need to do this. But he’s either unwilling or unable to dramatise, other than very crudely, Ellis French’s awareness that his mission to do well by his mother is doomed to failure.
26 March 2023
