Detroit

Just as a cam­era shifts its focus to cap­ture the inter­play between fore­ground and back­ground objects, movie nar­ra­tives too can some­times switch from panoram­ic vis­tas to micro details, and then right back again. Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, based on a screen­play by Mark Boal (this is the pair’s third cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tion), is an exer­cise in bold focus shift­ing. It hur­tles between per­spec­tives, moments, episodes and emo­tions when, ini­tial­ly, it seems to want to cap­ture the hub­bub of an entire city in its rov­ing lens. Which, let’s be hon­est, is an excit­ing and ambi­tious state­ment of intent.

Yet, when glanc­ing at this vast panora­ma, you can’t help but won­der what fine details you’re miss­ing. And then, when you’re able to see those details in gru­elling close-up, it’s hard to sup­press the desire to know what oth­er impor­tant events are hap­pen­ing else­where. It’s a bind which Bigelow and Boal accept, but their film suf­fers from a skewed bal­ance of empha­sis. At one point we’re see­ing every­thing, and then, sud­den­ly, we’re see­ing nothing.

From its widest van­tage, the sto­ry starts with a mon­tage of paint­ings by mid-cen­tu­ry African-Amer­i­can artist, Jacob Lawrence, as a nar­ra­tion offers a pré­cis of the Great Migra­tion and the black expe­ri­ence in Amer­i­ca. It then even­tu­al­ly lands on the city of Detroit in July of 1967, at the ori­gin point of a large-scale race riot. An alter­ca­tion at a speakeasy erupts into a pro­longed tus­sle between armed police and tooled-up locals. The nation­al guard are called in to curb dis­sent as busi­ness­es are ran­sacked and jail cells over­flow. Cer­tain mem­bers of law enforce­ment – young white men, in this case – see the whole sor­ry mess as an oppor­tu­ni­ty scratch those itchy trig­ger fin­gers and exer­cise some pre-emp­tive self defence.

Bar­ry Ackroyd’s rov­ing cam­era whips from per­son to per­son as he emu­lates the hus­tle and flow of a nev­er-say-die war reporter, get­ting right down there in the shit. The film show­cas­es some of his best work – it feels pur­pose built for his intu­itive, docu­d­ra­ma style which press­es the view­er to ques­tion what’s real and what’s fic­tion. Bigelow inserts the occa­sion­al flash of news­reel footage as a way to empha­sise her fideli­ty to real­i­ty, but it only serves to remind that we’re watch­ing a recre­ation, albeit a rig­or­ous one.

There’s a thrilling sug­ges­tion about 20 min­utes into the film that Detroit is going fur­nish us with the archi­tec­ture of a riot instead of con­triv­ing char­ac­ter arcs and minia­ture dra­mas. This ini­tial rejec­tion of con­ven­tion seems log­i­cal, and for a short while, it gen­uine­ly feels like this instinc­tu­al, free­wheel­ing approach, where the sto­ry just daisy-chains from one event to the next, is work­ing. And then sud­den­ly, the audi­ble clank of gears shift­ing cruds up the sound­track, and things begin to slow down and a lone, trag­ic hero hov­es into view.

Lar­ry Reed (Algee Smith) is a mem­ber of small­time R&B out­fit The Dra­mat­ics, and his shot at the big leagues is placed on ice when a cur­few caus­es their slot on an evening play­bill to be nixed. This won’t be the worst thing to hap­pen to Lar­ry this evening, as his hidey-hole safe haven – the dingy urban-exot­ic par­adise of the Algiers Motel – ends up acci­den­tal­ly beck­on­ing a com­pa­ny of unsavoury cops, led by Will Poulter’s mani­ac patrol­man Krauss.

At this point, the film casts aside the larg­er scale machi­na­tions of the riot to cap­ture an inter­lude which plays like a flip-flop of the famous ​“Be Black Baby” shock the­atre seg­ment from Bri­an de Palma’s 1970 film, Hi, Mom!. This pro­longed pow­er-play sequence depicts a qua­si-fascis­tic offi­cer exert­ing unnec­es­sary force over his (inno­cent) sus­pects, but his obvi­ous racist atti­tudes are masked by a crooked inter­nal log­ic – that he’s just doing his job. It’s a dan­ger­ous sce­nario where these men are primed towards racial­ly-moti­vat­ed vio­lence, and they also spy a good chance to get away with it. The home guard and state police turn a blind eye rather than choose to curb any poten­tial wrongdoing.

But where Detroit begins as an attempt to drama­tise real­i­ty, this pun­ish­ing cen­tral chap­ter plays like a schlock hor­ror movie with a side of leer­ing tor­ture. Poul­ter comes across as the sort of cack­ling mad­man dis­placed from a classy gial­lo, and the vio­lence is accen­tu­at­ed to the point of banal­i­ty and back again. It’s as if the only way Bigelow and Boal can rep­re­sent this locus point of supreme suf­fer­ing is to just lay it out clean, with unam­bigu­ous­ly evil cops bul­ly­ing unam­bigu­ous­ly vir­tu­ous cit­i­zens. As such, the film becomes about a sin­gle instance of police bru­tal­i­ty rather than a work con­nect­ed to the grand sweep of its open­ing his­to­ry lesson.

The inten­tion is to inject a dou­ble shot of close-quar­ters dra­ma into the pro­ceed­ings, and it works in the most super­fi­cial, dis­en­gaged way pos­si­ble. The open­ing sal­vo, where we’re straf­ing through the flames of city on the brink, where the pos­si­bil­i­ty of death lurks around ever bombed-out cor­ner, is where the real dra­ma lays. The idea that broad swathes of his­to­ry – and the his­to­ry of racial oppres­sion at that – can be abbre­vi­at­ed in this sin­gle moment seems at best wrong­head­ed and at worst offensive.

John Boyega’s dole­ful, blue-col­lar mama’s boy Melvin Dis­mukes is giv­en a front row seat to this out­rage. He could be seen to rep­re­sent the neutered, fear­ful onlook­er watch­ing with a cam­era phone as anoth­er white offi­cer exploits a posi­tion of author­i­ty and metes out spec­tac­u­lar pun­ish­ment on anoth­er black fall guy. For rea­sons of per­son­al safe­ty, he gags him­self, yet this impar­tial posi­tion is milked for dra­ma rather than any deep­er insight into his help­less predica­ment. From the few scenes he has, Boye­ga man­ages to become film’s most ambigu­ous and inter­est­ing char­ac­ter, but there’s a point where he’s left behind for larg­er concerns.

It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing and out­raged work, one which is clear­ly try­ing to do some­thing new with a fic­tion­alised real­i­ty tem­plate. There’s the feel­ing that it tries a lit­tle too hard to exist as a touch­point for more con­tem­po­rary con­cerns – its every frame craves rel­e­vance. Yet, the details of the sto­ry are sel­dom allowed to speak for them­selves, with every angle and talk­ing point pre-loaded, and every ques­tion giv­en a sat­is­fac­to­ry – but sel­dom rev­e­la­to­ry – answer.