Month: February 2011

Thought it might be nice to share titles available to stream on demand via Netflix. I’ve been working my way through Carlos: Miniseries, but I just noticed that Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank is also available.

Tanya Hamilton’s first flick slowly teases out the backstory, and it has a few moments of “big”(gish) Event of Consequence–but it’s at its strongest and most affecting in allowing its characters (and us) to steep in the aftermath. Set in 1976 Philadelphia, Night follows a few former Black Panthers and a neighborhood somewhat at peace but still scarred from a collision between brutal cops and an outraged violent resistance to such brutality. Marcus (Anthony Mackie) is back for his father’s funeral, but isn’t welcome, and isn’t comfortable; Patti (Kerry Washington) never left town, raises her daughter, reaches out a hand (and legal counsel) to “every orphan” in the neighborhood. You can pick at some of the overdetermined details of the plot arc, but Hamilton’s got a brilliant sense of silence and space — she lets these FANTASTIC actors simmer, calmly sit in a room together, take solace from one another. They’re amazing (and so is Jamie Hector, a.k.a. Marlo Stanfield). She’s edited many sequences to remove dialogue, or to cut things together leaving little blips and jumps that just slightly undermine naturalism; there are a few shots–police walking through an early-morning field, camera set on the ground and capturing them from the knees down, fireflies lifting up from each footfall.

The film also resists some neat Romanticism or Cynical twists, allowing a rich sense of how important the Panthers were in affirming community bonds–the vision of beret-clad violence explicitly critiqued, ‘though Hamilton’s empathy for that turn to struggle is equally strong.

Good movie. And a director to watch.