Wool over the eyes

Rating: 4/10 (13 March 2006)

I saw this film for the first time on TV the other night and was at first quite impressed. Denzel Washington is a consummate character actor and really lived the part. The boy taking refuge from his alcoholic parents was pleasant, sincere and convincingly supportive to the allegedly greatly wronged black ex-boxer. Dan Hedaya makes a very convincing bigoted cop who is supposed to have pursued, framed and persecuted the hero throughout his life in an even more ruthless and unfair manner than with the equivalent two characters in "Les Misérables". The do-gooder Canadians were very bland and sheepish, but that is probably how Americans think of Canadians so they were presumably doing what the director wanted. The boxing sequences thanks as much to skillful camera work as nifty footwork seemed authentic, at least to a non-boxer, which is by no means always the case.
As the film progressed I asked myself how it was that I had never heard of the particularly flagrant injustice on which the film was based when I was familiar with so many such stories emanating from the States and even from the U.K.. The reason became apparent when I looked at the chronological list of comments on this site and saw that I had almost certainly had the wool pulled over my eyes. From what was said by the less gullible commentators, the true character of the "Hurricane" was in fact more like that of the nasty murderous cop Denzel had played in "Training Day" than this persevering family man who has up to this point triumphed over undeserved adversity. (There is a hint of adulterous intent when Hurricane confesses why he was where he allegedly was on the night of the triple murder, but this flaw is put in to make him appear more human - a Persian rug salesman will show a customer the underside of a carpet and say "Look at the mistakes" which serve actually to increase the value.
I tried to access the URL quoted by one negative critic to read what the real facts of the case were, but it didn't work. So I looked up Hurricane Rubin Carter in the Wikipedia On-line Encyclopaedia, read the bare facts there, then moved to one of the links listed entitled "The Other Side". With carefully detailed and abundant documentation, the whole white-wash of this black boxer that the film attempts so successfully (if you don't check up afterwards) is utterly negated.
Whether the nice black boy ever existed I do not know, for Lazarus who in the New Testament arises from the dead seems to be an incredibly apt name for one who is given a new life by the nice Canadians, who also may or may not have existed. Whether they did exist or not, Hurricane did receive a lot of help to try and spring him from people some of whom must have believed in his innocence and others for political reasons.
However unfavourable the statistics are for reasons of social depression,one must not tend to believe a man is more likely to be guilty because he is black, any more than one should believe out of political correctness that he is innocent because he is black. I hope that we have generally left all that behind us by now. The fog produced by the element of alleged racism in the Simpson case was what allowed O.J. to slip through the net.
It would have been alright if they had changed the name to a fictitious one and made no claim to veracity. But I suppose this was impossible because Hurricane wrote both the book and the script and it would have been like pleading guilty if he had changed the name. As fiction I would have given it up to eight, as a barefaced lie four is generous.
Hurricane has done twenty years "bird" which, since often only five years is served per murder in States where they don't execute, this would give him a little change , and furthermore he shared his murders with an accomplice so that I suppose he has "paid his debt to society" and does seem to be acting as a useful citizen now.