Incredibly solid but frustratingly narrow

Rating: 6/10 (8 August 2017)

DETROIT is one of those movies so hurtful to critique harshly that I almost wouldn't bother and have other sites to take my word instead. On the one hand, I would love to see a movie - specifically a button-pushing procedural about the 12th Street Riots and the Algiers Motel incident - that slams subtle racism, abusive authority, and the overall spectrum of ignorant white man that continues to swarm our great country under the election of Drumpf. But on the other, it led me to wonder how much my wishes, and ultimately the final film, would compromise in the process. It was until I finally conclude that, no matter how much it seems "right", my aspirations feel misguided. In simpler terms, DETROIT is an expertly crafted, visceral, and well-intentioned movie that doesn't do much justice. It's a film that shows no mercy in depicting the unforgivable acts upon the black people that may still persist to this day without considering the proper perspective of the blacks beyond the surface level and the overdone.
But before I get ahead of myself, lets dig deep in the positives. For one thing, its NOT mainly an action war movie set in the riots. Director Kathryn Bigelow understands that the riots themselves was anything but "thrilling spectacle" so it's played sparse, gritty, and grounded. Thanks to Bigelows additional talent of pseudo-veritee, each scene with the riots and the Motel incident feels and looks real and unflinching. Almost feeling like a torture montage, we witness every hit, every shot, every scream, and every shed of tear in each frame as if we are in the moment ourselves. Along with the shockingly great talent on hand to portray these roles, its probably one of the most harrowing film I've seen since DUNKIRK.
Which ultimately disappoints me to say that the rest of the film feels too narrow and underdeveloped. First off, the black characters are deeply underdeveloped. As I watched the, admittedly horrifying, almost repetitive Motown scene in the second act, I noticed a weird overemphasis on developing the supposed white asshole cops rather than the suffering blacks. Sure they may have affected family members and backstories that get wrapped up rather neatly, but they only serve to both witness and endure the harrowing pain among the systemic racism at the time. John Boyega's black police character does barely a thing in this movie, serving as a POV to all of this brutality without much insight. The actors playing a Motown band only once speak up against the matter, but never do anything beyond that. Meanwhile, all the white actors - like the otherwise revelatory Will Poulter as a complex cop - get to be both the menacing and the sympathetic characters with more agency. And to my money, considering how it ends in a depressing ending in which the bad guys get away with 3 murders and 9 abuse charges (shut up, it's not a spoiler. Look it up), that's a huge miscalculation. It winds up in the typical "have its cake and eat it too" scenarios that sadly renders the black people as passive martyrs rather than real people in their own f-ing movie.
There's a boatload of think pieces about whether white filmmakers have any right to depict other cultures without their mindset. And while I admittedly have no objective say on the matter – since I'm white/Hispanic and not black – I also know that there's a fine line simply by experience. When I see movies like SELMA, STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON, or the latest TV show masterpiece DEAR WHITE PEOPLE, I commend their efforts to delve into how much systemic racism strangles our social climate to this day. But what makes these special stems from growing beyond that, offering new insight to the issue that never sacrifices the identities or humanity of black people affected by it. And the secret to that comes from a full black perspective that feels appropriate to their stories. Not to discredit Bigelow's talent or ambition, but it's one thing to sucker punch this issue in hopes for a change, but its another to exploit black pain to wake up white people to do so.
Which is ultimately a shame because I can recall Bigelow doing much more than that. HURT LOCKER revolutionized our perception of war fatigue and the human condition during battle, ZERO DARK THIRTY was both a metatextual distillation of depleted post-9/11 American morale amongst multiple dead ends and the ultimate catharsis of the same. And let's not mention how f**king awesome POINT BREAK was. But Bigelow seems out of depth here. For all the hype and stupidly dense runtime, she cannot escape the ingrained distance from the proper way of telling this.
Overall, DETROIT isn't bad but it stops short of being great. The riots are nasty yet alive, the acting is magnificent, and it damn near rejects the otherwise tone-deaf war epic alternative by being more grounded. But it stops dead to reach more than that, thinking it could be the definitive movie to "get people woke" without noticing the dozen other movies that did it better. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it, and I hope the otherwise dreadful Trump administration would promote others to stop meandering and do better.
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