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.
I really wanted to like this but was disappointed in the end. Hamilton was most successful telling Iris’s story (and the little girl who played her seemed the most believable/truthful figure on the screen, but that’s probably a given for an unpolished yet gifted child actor). Still, I felt disconnected from the film’s investment in the history of the Black Panthers or even the wounds still festering in Philadelphia some eight or nine years down the road (and I walked in without a lot of specifics or details to fill in the narrative gaps). A lot of the characters were too one-dimensional for my taste (Jimmy, Bunk from “The Wire”, DoRight), and the machinations of the plot often felt forced (particularly in the film’s final fifteen minutes). I suspect Hamilton was gently encouraged to edit away a lot of (good) material to achieve a brisk eighty-five minute running time. What was most problematic, however, was the sense of space. The world projected on the screen did not feel entirely “lived-in” to me. Was the film shot on high-definition video? If not, why were the images so flat? I wish Hamilton had played around with different film stock to achieve a bit more texture and depth to the images (particularly when juxtaposed against dynamic, archival footage of civil rights activists back in the day). I don’t want to hate on a black, female filmmaker finding her voice and style–Night Catches Us is certainly a very promising debut–but I also don’t want to grade on a curve.
jeff, are you suggesting that some of mike’s favourite film-makers are black? or that he’s trying to cover for the great huckleberry finn censorship giveaway of 2011?
I don’t know about film stock, but the limited views and locations has more to do with budget than anything else.
Only examine the script, and I’m probably with you, Jeff, in some ways. But what Hamilton does with the actors — and even DoRight (‘though I agree with you about Wendell Pierce) — is give them a lot of room to be silent, or to react. These are understated performances, largely, and very contemplative; you don’t see that too often in first-time directors. I also think that engages and resonates with her script’s less event-driven elements: the way history informs, but isn’t spelled out (those gaps) as it deforms, everyday lives. Sure, there’s some histrionics–Bunk, the angry young can-hauler (‘though even he gets some very nice moments). But I really loved the stuff with Mackie and Washington …
Any curve I’m grading on is about first-time tendencies, and even controlling for that inflation I think Hamilton’s got a solid B+ here.
Yeah, low budget and probably minimal rehearsal (if any) and only a handful of takes from which to choose. That kind of budgetary expediency showed. Still, I think about Killer of Sheep, which Hamilton pays homage to in a number of scenes, and I am quite in awe of Burnett’s ability to capture a sense of place and time (on little to no money) in ways that Hamilton and her team can only begin to imagine. It was an ambitious project.
No argument there–Burnett’s the gold standard. . . .