Frightened racist white cops torture innocent blacks in 1967 Detroit

Rating: 10/10 (15 August 2017)

This film propels Kathryn Bigelow to the forefront of American directors. It is a powerful, superbly constructed, insightful and circumspect demonstration of today's most tragic truth — what we hoped was Obama's post-racist America turned out to be neo-racist America.
Though it centers on the 1967 Detroit riot and police abuse of African-Americans, seeing it after Charlottesville makes the film sadly prophetic.
As Christopher Nolan did in Dunkirk, Bigelow thrusts us into the action pell-mell, shooting everything in frenzy and close-up, not pausing to explain or reframe. Again we feel the impossible confusion and suffocation of war. What the dialogue tells us is less important than our visceral experience of the victims under siege and the police scared into brutishness.
The film frames that tumultuous action with calm stills. The prologue is artistic renderings of the history — paintings of the southern blacks' movement north for civil rights and jobs and the whites' consequent evacuation of the cities for the ostensibly purer suburbs. If they escaped Jim Crow the blacks couldn't escape the prejudiced legal and social systems.
The epilogue states the fates of the various characters. The whites escaped conviction. That's what white privilege is all about — they win the loopholes. The blacks found what compromises their conviction allowed, like the brilliant singer who skips out on his group's Motown success to sing in a neighbourhood church choir. The civil courts give token acknowledgment of the guilt and justice the white legal system denied.
None of those consequences erase or forgive the arrogant and sadistic bigotry of the white crop Krauss. He is just a boy, trigger happy, but with centuries of racism in his veins and culture — and the confidence the colour gap bequeathes him. In an early conversation in the police car he seems to understand and sympathize with the blacks' predicament — but then he gets the chance to shoot one. The die is cast.
To Krauss the torture of his prisoners is a game. Sadistic and brutal but a game, the way a toy gun in the minds of the frightened National Guard and police swells into a mortally dangerous sniper, to be caught and punished at all costs — especially to the innocent blacks. One cop hasn't learned the "game," though, so he kills instead of just pretending to. That's what happens when a game is played on people to whom it is far from a game.
So far this is the best American film of the year — and by far the most important. I would say that even if Charlottesville had not happened last weekend and President Trump had not been exposed as the personification of American racism, hypocrisy and ignorance. All that only validates Bigelow's vision.
But all the Oscars of the eve won't amend America's racist history and its continuing choke-hold on the nation. That will take a wide and profound social reform of which America has yet to prove itself capable — or even willing.