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Thursday, June 20, 2019
MOVIE REVIEW (NETFLIX)/When They See Us
Five Who Came Home Years After The World Moved On
A scene from the epic Nexflix film "When
They See Us", directed by Ava DuVernay.
Netflix
by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
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Thursday,
June 20,
2019
A brooding, claustrophic New York penetrates the heart of the epically
heartbreaking "When They See Us", Ava DuVernay's powerful choronicle of five
innocent young Black and Latino teenagers convicted of an April 1989 attack on a
white female jogger in Central Park that they didn't commit. Ms.
DuVernay's five-hour film is an exclusive Netflix limited series, which will
play to even more shocking effect on the big screen should Netflix decide to put
it in cinemas for awards season at year's end.
"When They See Us" unfolds as the real-life nightmarish institutional
desecration of innocence it is. Hellish and harrowing, the film introduces
us to five Black and Latino boys whose everyday human existence and happiness is
shattered. A large New York park lauded as a beautific Big Apple landmark
becomes a cavernous nocturnal cauldron of terror and violations viscerally
depicted in unblinking fashion. After the chaos of a bloody night the
unbeknownst Korey Wise (played brilliantly by Jharrel Jerome) only wants to
accompany his friend Yusef Salaam (Ethan Herisse) to the police station while
he's questioned because,4 after all, that's what best pals do, right? "My
moms will kill me if I don't," Korey says to a calculating New York City police
detective in one fateful moment.
Innocence is a casualty when you are Black, and guilt is the presumption.
In an American backdrop of 2019, where a sizable number of white people across
the U.S. call the police on Black people for no reason but to see Black people
punished or killed, the young Kevin Richardson (Asante Blackk) of 1989 happens
to be in Central Park on a spring night to breathe, live and be the fun-loving
boy he is. Within minutes an evil thunderbolt shatters the warm nightsky:
a police officer chases Kevin and inflicts the first of many deep scars his
budding adolescence will bear.
Most painful of all, Antron McCray (Caleel Harris) is told by his father
(Michael K. Williams)--who thinks he's helping his son--to lie his way out of
trouble and tragically into jail. Their father-son relationship is as
tangled as the close relationship is loving between Raymond Santana (John
Leguizamo) and his son (Marquis Rodriguez). The families and their sons
are given a humanity and genuineness by Ms. DuVernay that no one else has on
film. The five boys also grow up on camera and all but one are played by
different actors as they navigate the penal system that kneecaps them for
failure before they even enter.
The system convicted the boys and their families in two ways: the boys for their
Blackness and the parents for their naivety. This sad, crude truth
permeates "When They See Us", its unscrupulous chief antagonist Manhattan
District Attorney Sex Crime Unit head Linda Fairstein (Felicity Huffman) as an
architect of modern-day enslavement disrupter of families. In one heroic
scene, Sharonne Salaam (Aunjanue Ellis) interrupts an interrogation of her son,
much to the chagrin of Ms. Fairstein, who these days offscreen is getting the
appropriate corrective measures to her infamous handling of this Scottboro-type
injustice.
Everyone in "When They See Us" isn't black and white. Some of the boys'
defense attorneys have interests that don't necessarily reside with their
clients. People in the prosecutors office who question the efficacy of Ms.
Fairstein's very weak case against boys whom the world is convinced are rapists.
Linda Fairstein's relentless missive and assault (in real-life and onscreen)
against the five young boys caught up in Central Park is the systemic equivalent
of gunman Bernhard Goetz's proclamation against the Black youths he shot on a
New York City subway train only a few years earlier: "I wanted to kill those
guys. I wanted to maim those guys. I wanted to make them suffer in
every way I could." This Goetz quote is Fairstein's own bigoted national
anthem, and she lives by every word of it in her drive to destroy innocent
teenagers.
"When They See Us" is a compelling articulation about systemic racism and the
violence it wreaks on a psychological and institutional basis. The
American criminal justice system is accurately captured as the monsters or
wolfpack it is intended to be (the police, press and prosecutors), as inveighed
against Black and Brown males. Then come the monsters the system makes
behind prison bars. One extremely difficult and disturbing part of Ms.
DuVernay's film is the brutalization of Mr. Wise as he is processed through one
prison after another wading through another more dangerous circle of Hell.
This chapter of the film is a singular separate horror movie that makes Mr.
Wise's journey stand apart from his fellow survivors.
One of the many effective aspects of "When They See Us" is the inside-outing of
America's media-hallowed mythology of "good" police. Long-celebrated in
U.S. television as straight arrow can't-do-wrongs, from Joe Friday to Baretta to
James Rockford to Steve McGarrett to the cadre of "Law And Order" detectives,
the police in Ms. DuVernay's film are shown in ways more honest and true to 2019
(and forever prior to that time) as violent, opportunistic, law-breaking racist
yahoos whose goal is to break the will of Black and Latino teenage boys over a
48-hour, no-food, sleep or bathroom break period. A moment in front of an
American flag for twisted malevolent cop Mike Sheehan (William Sadler), who in
actuality made a career in the New York television news media off his
illegalities, crystalizes the film's title, the police (and by extension the
society's) attitude to Black and Latino male (and female) youth.
"When They See Us" is a forensic roller-coaster ride of family, faith, fantasy,
friction, with New York society, rich, poor and indifferent as a
media-influenced Dante's Inferno. Ms. DuVernay captures a criminal justice
system that operated far worse, insidious and heinous than the brutal crime
Matias Reyes committed against Patricia Meili thirty years ago, to reveal a
larger systemic terror crime: punishing the innocent despite exculpatory DNA
evidence. Each story here is rendered so palpably and with such range so
as to be an aching heartbeat of an American life that all too many Black and
Brown people still experience.
Ms. DuVernay's film is a matter-of-fact dramatization of the events of April 19,
1989 (including the vicious attack on Ms. Meili) and the relentless
institutional attacks on boys who only want to live life. Part of these
boys' lives was killed off forever thirty years ago. Donald Trump,
reintroduced here as a perverse monster of menace and malice as a media-beloved
real estate mogul, served as judge, jury and excecutioner in chief then with his
$85,000 published May 1989 newspaper ads of racist pronouncements of guilt on
the five innocent boys. He has since extrapolated that psychopathy, hate,
dishonesty and cruelty to the entire country.
For all the enduring horror and callousness of its systemic punishers there is
fractious though loving support from family who do the time with their loved
ones (an excellent Niecy Nash as the mother of Korey Wise), and the final frames
of "When They See Us" accompanied by Frank Ocean's masterful, melancholic and
ironic rendition of "Moon River", will bring smiles and tears. The
lingering of Mr. Wise's name on screen -- and certainly not by accident -- is
just one never-forget moment of an unforgettable five hours of essential, superb
filmmaking.
With: Jovan Adepo, Chris Chalk, Justin Cunningham, Freddy Miyares, Marsha
Stephanie Blake, Kylie Bunbury, Blair Underwood, Christopher Jackson, Joshua
Jackson.
"When They See Us" is rated TV-MA. It contains disturbing violent
content, sexuality, blunt and coarse language. It is exclusively on
Netflix. The film running time is four hours and 54
minutes.
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