Sundance Kicks Off with Two Urgent Films About Race in America

A police shooting forms the gravitational center of two new films screened at the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday and Friday, kicking the festival off with an urgent, despairing charge. Though Reinaldo Marcus Green’sMonsters and Men and Carlos López Estrada’sBlindspotting both locate their pieces in the horror of police brutality—particularly as inflicted upon black men in America—the films take wildly different stylistic and narrative tacks, one more successfully than the other.

Green’s film, a sorrowful triptych largely set in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood, plays with a solemn hush, but is still plenty forceful in the ways it examines the constricting, consuming effects of aggressive police presences in black and Latinx communities. On a balmy summer night, a young Nuyorican man named Manny (Anthony Ramos) witnesses a policeman killing an unarmed man whose only crime was selling loose cigarettes on a street corner. There are obvious similarities here to the real-life killing of Eric Garner, one of many cases in recent years that gained national attention and helped spur on movements like Black Lives Matter.

Green is clearly interested in that larger context, but he keeps his film’s gaze intimate. He first follows Manny, who recorded the incident on his phone, as he weighs whether or not to post the video online. On the one hand, Manny is furious over the injustice and wants to take action. But on the other, he’s got a young family and their well-being to consider—a pair of plainclothes cops (both white) have been not-so-subtly threatening him to keep quiet.

The film’s second part switches perspectives and zeroes in on a black patrol officer, Dennis (John David Washington), whose principled loyalty to police work conflicts with his lived experience. He’s been the victim of profiling himself, and knows that the mechanisms of law enforcement are often bitterly unjust. His wife, Michelle (Nicole Beharie), fears for his safety, while his mostly white colleagues eye him warily as an internal affairs investigation into the shooting closes in. This is not an intense annals-of-power thriller, though. It’s instead a quiet look at a personal moral quandary that has no easy answers, a conflict Green illustrates with sensitivity. Though all three sections of the film have didactic bits when big ideas are plainly stated, the bulk of Monsters and Men renders huge issues with a fluid understatement. But that disarming pensiveness and interiority doesn’t forget the anger and sadness of the story—instead, it somehow heightens it, affording these characters a grounded texture that casts their struggles in a piercingly humane light.

The film’s final third is a poignant portrait of a teenage baseball star, Zee (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.), at the dawning of his social and political consciousness. One could see this segment as a gently rousing call to action, and it is, in a way. But the film is careful to frame Zee’s awakening as its own kind of tragedy—that so many young people are forced to take up the fight for their own lives with so little institutional support, in a system that dishonors and vilifies this kind of protest, one that asks silence and blind gratitude of those who’ve achieved some measure of success or status, and punishes those who don’t. (In that way, the film vaguely evokes the persecution of Colin Kaepernick.) In this final stretch, Monsters and Men gestures to the vast scope of what’s really being spoken about here, and yet still maintains its arresting immediacy, its particular beauty. The final shot may be wholly predictable, but it’s still a stunner, Green ruefully, sincerely offering up a character as a small agent of hope.

The film is gorgeously staged, cinematographer Patrick Scola’s camera gliding and reeling, Kris Bowers’s dreamy score playing as both plaint and prayer. The performances are uniformly gripping, with Ramos, Washington, and Harrison, Jr. the standouts, if only because they have the most to do. (Beharie remains as welcome here—sharp, natural, incisive—as she is in everything. Please put her in everything?)

There’s an argument to be made that Monsters and Men is too tasteful for such seismically important, infuriating topics; perhaps the film dulls its stakes with all its lilting aesthetics. As I see it, though, Green’s melancholy reserve articulates something vital and heartbreaking. Alongside all the clamor and fury of this necessary outrage, there is also the everyday ache of these lives, infected and shaped by racism and its destructive ends, yet still possessed of precious everyday joys, hard won and tenuous as they might be.

Those in search of pure clamor and fury may find something more galvanizing in Blindspotting, a messy and ambitious first feature that never pulls its punches nor mutes its intent. Friends, co-writers, and co-stars Daveed Diggs (of Hamilton fame) and Rafael Casal have, working with Estrada, conjured up a West Oakland of violence and merriment, tradition and change, stasis and unease.

Blindspotting tries to tackle a lot: the creep of gentrification, post-incarceral life, childhood friendships toxic in their codependence, police violence against black men. This is a familiar problem for semi-autobiographical work, the determination to throw in every little facet of a story rather than honing in on one or two key elements. Blindspotting veers jarringly from antic, profane comedy to heavy drama with whiplash speed. Where Monsters and Men is maybe one-note in its somber, elegiac tone, Blindspotting never settles into a consistent cadence. This isn’t exactly a problem, in theory—movies can contain multitudes, of course—but in this trio’s overeager execution, all that chaos renders the movie curiously inert.

That doesn’t diminish the righteousness of its mission. The film blazes with sincerity, and Diggs and Casal are so committed to this personal tale that one really wants to follow them on their journey. But we need better guidance than Estrada provides. As the story of an ex-con named Collin (Diggs) on his last few nights of probation unfolds—Casal plays Miles, Collin’s caustic best friend and frequent undoer—we’re yanked from beat to beat, from reference-y yuppie critique to soupy melodrama to startling violence and back again. Estrada’s film is too easily distracted to give anything its due consideration. Blindspotting crescendos toward an abstract scene of spoken-word poetry that could be a centerpiece knockout were it not the film’s umpteenth ungainly flourish. The lily is just so fully gilded by that point that the film’s potency has been utterly zapped, and Digg’s earnest jeremiad falls flat.

Still, Blindspotting, which was the heralded opening-night film at the festival, has an undeniable presence. Diggs, a gifted theatrical actor and musician, goes for broke in a way that’s both electrifying and uncomfortable, even if his character’s choices frustratingly strain logic. I may prefer the measured, poetic terms of Monsters and Men, but that doesn’t preclude the obvious necessity of a film like Blindspotting. What both movies are grappling with has no easy prescription, no one clear line of inquiry.

It’s heartening to see Sundance begin this year’s program with these two probing—and radically different—pieces. They’ve been given an ample showcase on their way, one hopes, to healthy distribution. Neither film will be for everyone, but they were made for so many.

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