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John Boyega plays a security guard trying to be a “good guy” in Detroit. It doesn’t turn out well.
Academy Award-winning director Kathryn Bigelow’s gripping new feature film Detroit takes audiences into the heart of the urban rebellion that shook the Motor City 50 years ago. While Bigelow’s relentless, hard-hitting drama has a documentary vibe to it, Detroit is a scripted movie. News footage (for instance of Michigan Governor George Romney, Mitt’s father), black and white photos, voiceovers of news broadcasts plus newspaper clippings are skillfully integrated to enhance the realism of this almost two-and-half-hour denunciation of police brutality.
There has arguably never been a movie like this in Hollywood history. Detroit opens with what seems to be an animated sequence with paintings by Jacob Lawrence accompanied by subtitles that provide historical context and set the stage for the Detroit insurrection of 1967. Between July 23 and 27 of that year, forty-three people were killed and 1,189 injured. There were more than 7,200 arrests and about 2,000 buildings were burned.
After the opening sequence, Bigelow’s picture moves swiftly, depicting a Detroit Police Department raid on an unlicensed after-hours club, where a local soldier is being welcomed back home from Vietnam. Police roust and make a completely unnecessary mass arrest of the partiers, who are paraded out of the club’s front entrance in full view of the public.
Adding insult to injury, a cop cops a feel, improperly touching an outraged African American woman. Believing the bust to be totally improper and unwarranted, a neighborhood crowd, quickly gathers, and bottles, rocks, and Molotov cocktails start flying.
As looting breaks out, Governor Romney mobilizes the Michigan Army National Guard and President Johnson sends in the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions to suppress the resistance. A newly minted Congressman John Conyers (Laz Alonso of 2009’s Avatar) bravely mounts a car with a bullhorn to address his agitated fellow Detroiters, proclaiming, “change is coming.”
As rumors of snipers swirl, a little girl peeks through a window and antsy National Guardsmen shoot her with a machine gun. Police officer Krauss (English actor Will Poulter of 2015’s The Revenant) shoots a looter in the back as he runs away. The officer is reprimanded by a superior who says he’s filing murder charges against Krauss, but perhaps because the authorities are shorthanded, Krauss is returned to active duty. According to how the story unfolds onscreen, this proves to be a lethal mistake.
Bigelow’s film follows the soul group, The Dramatics, as it flees a concert hall and takes refuge in the Algiers Motel. But when Guardsmen believe they are coming under fire from a sniper inside the lodgings, the motel becomes a battle scene, and lawmen, with Krauss in the lead, are shown running amok, outrageously, savagely brutalizing the people inside.
Detroit then moves inside a courtroom as the mostly white officers are tried by an all-white jury and judge, who rules the defendants’ confessions of their brutality to be “inadmissible.” When the parents of a slain victim are asked outside the courthouse how they feel, with great dignity the father responds that for the family “it’s a terrible pain,” which, his wife movingly adds, is “a pain that never goes away.”
Detroit’s most intriguing characters are Larry Cleveland (Algee Smith of the BET mini-series The New Edition Story) and Melvin Dismukes (British thesp John Boyega of the Star Wars film franchise).
Melvin is a security guard who tries to walk the straight and narrow. Guarding a shop during the looting, he generously brings hot coffee to the nearby Guardsmen. Melvin makes the tragic of mistake of thinking that as long as he plays by the rules and is “one of the good ones,” he’ll be spared the worst of racism. But when Melvin is ensnared in the Algiers Motel incident, he is disabused of that notion.
Anthony Mackie (2009’s The Hurt Locker and the Captain America flicks) is excellent as Greene, a Vietnam veteran who finds out that the war back home is worse than the one he fought in Southeast Asia. John Krasinski, who co-starred in Michael Bay’s 2016 Benghazi propaganda movie 13 Hours, is rather cleverly cast as the officer’s defense attorney, facing Jeremy Strong (2012’s Zero Dark Thirty) as the opposing counsel.
Bigelow, the only woman to win a Best Director Oscar, for her Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker, collaborated on Detroit with screenwriter Mark Boal, as she had for that earlier film and Zero Dark Thirty. Locker’s cinematographer Barry Ackroyd also shot Detroit, bestowing a nitty-gritty cinema verite feel upon the ripped-from-the-headlines saga, with his moody, sometimes handheld camerawork. There is also a great soundtrack featuring the immortal Motown Sound and more sixties’ era music.
Zero Dark Thirty was a despicable piece of pro-CIA propaganda, but with Detroit Bigelow has redeemed herself. In terms of cinema history, it calls to mind D.W. Griffith trying to atone and makeup for his racist 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation by filming 1916’s colossal Intolerance, about man’s inhumanity to man throughout the ages.
There have been other films that depict riots, such as Spike Lee’s excellent 1989 Do the Right Thing and Martin Scorsese’s 2002 Gangs of New York, as well as the 1967 youth-oriented B-picture Riot on Sunset Strip.
The most tragic thing about Detroit is how timely the story remains. While the rioters, looters, bomb throwers, and snipers of America’s urban insurrections have been largely spontaneous and unorganized, if police brutality continues, someday U.S. rebels may get organized. And in comparison, that would make Detroit 1967 look like a picnic in the park.
As part of the “Ten Films That Shook the World” series celebrating the Russian Revolution’s centennial film historian/reviewer Ed Rampell is co-presenting Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s revolutionary poetic classic Earth on Friday, 7:30 p.m., August 25, 2017 at The L.A. Workers Center, 1251 S. St. Andrews Place, L.A., CA 90019. For info: laworkersedsoc@gmail.com.