DETROIT (Kathryn Bigelow 2017)

[Chris Knipp]

Time's reviews are negative (there are several).

By Alexander Nazaryan (Armenian-American?):

Bigelow does far too little to complicate our expectations. The lead bully among the cops, Krauss (played by an eternally sneering Will Poulter), is exactly the racist bully you’ve known him to be since the opening of the film, when he shoots a looter in the back, killing him. Reprimanded by a senior detective with a sense of dignity, Krauss is allowed to return to the streets of Detroit, where crooked cops are apparently better than no cops at all. Later, at the Algiers, he is too stupid to see how his escalating violence is going to spell his own doom.It’s not that we need to understand Krauss, or to explain his racism and violence. But for view- ers expecting some deeper truth about what happened 50 years ago, and what is still happening today, a cartoonish cop—just a thug with a gun and badge—is not enough.

Frankly, Detroit could have used more Detroit, more of the panoramic view Bigelow teases at the movie’s opening. The scenes of the police abusing the innocent guests at the motel are meant to enrage the viewer, and at first they do, but they occupy the better part of this two-hour film and, before long, the discomforting realization is that you’ve grown bored by the relentless brutality.

Was Bigelow, who is white, the right person to make this movie? The question seems inevitable, given the intense debate over cultural appropriation, but also impossible to answer. Race doesn’t have to be a barrier: In American Pastorial, Philip Roth wrote beautifully about racial unrest in 1967 Newark. And Loving, by the white director Jeff Nichols, is an indelible statement on the crushing effects of bigotry.

What’s missing from Bigelow’s film is not sensitivity but nuance. Her characters never come alive, moving through the film less as people than entries in a sociology textbook. It’s an especially striking shortcoming because Bigelow was so good, in both The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, at intensely engrossing deconstructions of people far outside her experience. If Bigelow could get inside the minds of soldiers suffocated by post-traumatic stress disorder, as she did so capably in The Hurt Locker, she can get into the mind of anyone. In Zero Dark Thirty, she made even CIA interrogators likeable. The characters in Detroit, though, black and white, are as flat as the plains of the Upper Midwest.

Stephanie Zacharek's is less totally critical (again, excerpts):

But if Detroit—written by Mark Boal, who has also made two other pictures with Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker—is a well-intentioned picture, it’s also a flawed one. This is filmmaking that sets out to make its points but fails, in big ways and small ones, to forge an emotional connection with most of its characters. In a strange way, it’s more fixated on the white cops, Krauss (Will Poulter) and Flynn (Ben O’Toole)—their characters are stand-ins for the real-life cops in the Algiers Motel case, Ronald August and Robert Paille—who figure prominently in the film’s extended, excruciating centerpiece..
. The sequence is brutally effective in the sense that it’s likely to make you ashamed to be an American. (I certainly felt shame.) But effective filmmaking isn’t always the same as good filmmaking. And subjecting your audience to unrelenting grimness, as Bigelow does, isn’t the best way to convey the weight of real-life brutality and injustice. It doesn’t help that Poulter and O’Toole give clumsily shaped performances that distract from the violence at hand rather than heighten it. They come at their characters with a mustache-twirling cartoonishness. If only evil were so easy to identify in real life.

[She notes the fine acting of Boyega and Smith.]

But in dealing with the riots overall, Bigelow fails to give us a sense of the city’s geography, a sense of what’s happening where, especially after federal troops and National Guardsmen are brought in to help quell the looting and arson. The story sprawls out of her control in places where pinpoint control is needed. And the movie’s wrap-up, where we learn what happened to the police officers charged in the murders of the three victims—their punishment, or lack thereof, won’t come as a surprise—feels hasty and unshaped. Detroit is the type of movie we need right now. But there’s no shame in wishing that it were a better one.