Inside Man

Director Spike Lee

INSIDE MAN            B+                                                                                                                 USA  (129 mi)  2006  d: Spike Lee

You know, there’s a famous saying by the Baron de Rothschild, “When there’s blood in the streets, buy property.”                                                                                                 —Madeleine White (Jodie Foster)

A huge commercial success for Lee, one of the few features he directed that he did not write, his only feature to be No. 1 at the box office in the first week of its release, ultimately grossing $185 million, more than four times the budget of $45 million, his most profitable film to date, yet his plans for a sequel never materialized, reassigned elsewhere as INSIDE MAN: MOST WANTED (2019), a tepid film that ended up on Netflix.  Beginning with a Bollywood sounding opening song, Inside Man " Chaiyya Chaiyya" (Version RB) - YouTube YouTube (7:22), adding a cultural universality which plays in perfect precision to a distinctive New York City opening montage, while Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), a criminal mastermind in close-up, speaking directly to the camera, narrates a robbery taking place at the main branch of the Manhattan Trust Bank, a fictional institution located at Wall Street and Broadway, where capitalism intersects with show business, confessing to a perfect crime, apparently from an enclosed prison cell, so the entire film may be playing back in flashback mode.  Taking control of the bank while disguised as house painters, each of the four bank robbers are wearing sunglasses and masks, as they immediately dismantle the surveillance system while taking customers and bank employees as hostages, blindfolding and separating them, tying their hands behind their backs, then switching them from room to room, never allowing hostages or viewers to be certain of who they are, identifying themselves only as derivations of the name Steve (Carlos Andrés Gómez), like Stevie (Kim Director), or Steve-O (James Ransone).  Immediately the bank is surrounded by a horde of NYPD officers as well as snipers on the roofs, commanded by Captain Darius (Willem Dafoe), all targeting the entrance.  Each time the robbers release a hostage, they are accompanied by a message, yet police immediately point their guns and handcuff them before taking them away, each one viewed as a suspect until proven otherwise.  One is a Sikh bank employee, Vikram Walia (Waris Ahluwalia), who is mandhandled by the police, thinking he’s carrying a bomb as he looks like an Arab, causing him to lose his turban, a symbol of religious observance, showing no regard whatsoever for his loss, despite his repeated pleading, where the belligerence of the predominantly white NYPD is all-consuming, wearing their pronounced racism on their sleeve, as they know only one gear, brute ferocity, which suggests a crude indifference.  It must be said, few capture the rhythm and earthy style of New York City like Spike Lee, who seems to delight in the way people express themselves, using different pronunciations, different inflections in their speech, all seemingly spewing profanity, with the director having an eye and ear for detail, often injecting humor, beautifully encapsulating a city as only he can.  Opening in the theaters at the same time as another thriller, V FOR VENDETTA (2005), it’s interesting that both use a similar plot device in the commission of a crime, dressing all the hostages up in the exact same masks and jump suits that they are wearing while V improbably sends Guy Fawkes masks to everyone in London to thoroughly confuse the police establishment, in each case allowing the criminals to perfectly blend into the crowd.  This has the makings of another bank heist caper, and even pays homage in the script to Dog Day Afternoon (1975), using two actors recreating similar roles from that earlier film, a hostage, Marcia Jean Kurtz, and a pizza delivery guy, Lionel Pina, while the pizza itself comes from Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, a reference to Do the Right Thing (1989), but this one surprisingly has other hidden motives buried beneath the layers of the 9/11 rubble, namely the politically connected cover ups of New York City’s finest, who conveniently make deals to keep the real problems from ever surfacing.  Shot by Matthew Libatique, mostly with handheld cameras, using a distinct visual style, favoring the long, continuous shot, this is a film simmering with a cross-section of New York City sounds and surfaces, featuring a variety of ethnic groups, even a street-wise 8-year old child (Amir Ali Said) playing what amounts to the world’s most violent video game.  Unafraid of the bank robbers, as he’s from “Brooklyn,” he tells the police he actually identifies with the robbers, as they’re just trying to get paid.  The same can not be said for the rest of the hostages, most of whom cower in fear, made to strip down to their underwear and wear identical outfits, forced to hand over their cellphones to the robbers, yet one wise guy tries to outsmart them, quickly identified, pulled into another room, and through a translucent window of a closed room, we see him getting the snot beaten out of him, a clever device that keeps all the others in line.  The shot through the window, captured in real time, shares the same spatial viewpoint of the hostages, where viewers see what other hostages see, which allows us to easily identify with them.  Another shot shows Russell with the young kid sitting alone in the bank vault, offering him a pizza slice and a drink, seen chatting casually, a shot that allows viewers to identify with the bank robbers, as they’re not seen as such bad guys, demonstrating compassion, going out of their way to take an interest in this kid, undermining the stereotype of a criminal mentality.  This shot actually expands the ambiguous nature of Russell, whose motives remain unclear throughout, as they’re not really interested in taking the money, but seem obsessed by the contents in one particular safety deposit box.  This subverts the motives of a typical bank heist film, while confusing both the cops and audiences alike, adding a level of psychological mystery and intrigue not normally seen in genre movies.            

Denzel Washington plays another cocky police officer, Detective Keith Frazier, along with his sidekick, Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor), making a living as a smooth-talking hostage negotiator.  In what appears to be an homage to SHAFT (1971), he keeps his girlfriend (Cassandra Freeman) simmering in the sheets while he’s out taking care of the city’s business, matching wits with the bad guys.  Here he’s under police investigation on a drug case that’s suspiciously missing $140,000, but due to a convenient police personnel absence, he’s called into action on a bank heist in progress with hostages.  Once this makes the news, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer), the bank CEO, a financier with something to hide, goes into action to protect his shameful secrets which are contained in an unregistered safety deposit box, calling in a mysterious, ultra-professional power broker, or fixer, an unusually perky Jodie Foster as Madeleine White, a shadowy figure dressed in stiletto heels and sharp designer suits who greases the wheels for the super rich and either clears the way for what they want or makes their problems disappear, all for huge sums of money.  The rest of the film unravels through various hierarchies, as there’s a chain of command in place at every level, the perpetrators of the crime, and those responsible for providing law and order, where White, in speaking to Frazier, makes it clear she is working above his pay grade, setting him straight, so to speak, reminding him of “his place.”  In other words, blacks are not welcome in the ultra elite confines of Wall Street business transactions.  The objectives of both remain obscure and unclear, covered up in a politically recognizable public persona that we all see on TV, where motives and explanations remain fairly standard, while their real purpose remains secretive and hidden and may never see the light of day.  Both sides secretly plant security microphones on each other, with the police foiled by a mastermind crook who is on to their techniques, as what the police microphone picks up is a long drawn-out speech by a former Albanian President, now deceased, alerting them that their surveillance efforts failed.  Back and forth negotiations have also stalled, with Frazier making no headway, yet he remains baffled by the case, developing a healthy respect for his counterpart who seems to anticipate his every move.  In a climactic moment, as the police are about to send in a SWAT team, Frazier becomes aware of a microphone sent out with one of the earlier hostages, allowing the robbers to listen to the police plans the entire time, including this police raid storming the bank.  Having prepared for this, the robbers gather all the hostages, mixed together with the robbers themselves, all dressed alike, and release them out the front door, where it’s virtually impossible to detect differences between victims and perpetrators.  The police point their guns, push everyone to the ground, and handcuff each hostage, while taking them into custody on police buses.  As it turns out, none of the hostages recognize any of the robbers, and perhaps more surprisingly, no money was taken.  According to the bank, nothing is missing, so no real crime occurred.  Frazier is ordered to bury the case, though obvious questions remain as to the unanswered motive, which has cleverly been kept secret, though Frazier is on to the missing safe deposit box.  What typically happens is that anyone getting too close is either transferred, fired, or their careers ruined.  In this film, Washington’s cop mixes it up with some pretty exclusive company.  Lee pitched the film to Hollywood executives as a star-ridden movie that, unlike his previous films, did not contain a racial or polarizing narrative.  The promotion of the film accentuated a typical box office strategy of an action-packed bank heist thriller, omitting Lee’s name from the marketing campaign, as studios found him too didactic and controversial politically, only to discover a suspenseful narrative, written by first-time screenwriter Russell Gewirtz, a former lawyer, that was actually about contemporary racism, anti-Semiticsm, and a lust for capitalist greed, with an indirect commentary on the Patriot Act’s forced standardization of national diversity, centered around New York and the homogenization of the city’s culture.  One remarkable aspect of the film is the utilization of film noir and neo-noir to construct a counter-narrative on security and surveillance that causes confusion, pointing out the prevalent use of cameras both inside and outside the bank, while also taking a look at the erasure of history through the narrative and stylistic conventions of an action film.  This film makes surprising references to the Holocaust, noting what kind of blatant thievery was taking place by the Nazi’s, as Jews transported to death camps were in no position to protect their financial interests, so their wealth was stolen blindly by their adversaries, then covered up in the aftermath of war, with some cashing in their stolen investments to make a killing, showing a structurally corrupt system still at work today.  Basically Lee made a film within the studio system that shrewdly criticizes the system.  Without ever offering a history lesson, this is key to understanding the underlying complexity of this film, and what really makes it worth watching, as sprinkled throughout Lee’s career his movies have taken an interest in critical moments in history.  Many viewers, however, missed this aspect of the film, believing he left his moral concerns behind, finding the film’s lack of a political agenda refreshing.

One of the few films that connected 9/11 to the impending stock market crash of 2007 (Financial crisis of 2007–2008 - Wikipedia), with a multitude of bank foreclosures, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, where minorities took the greatest hit, and few were ever held accountable.  Fittingly, most of the action is set on Wall Street.  In the period after 9/11, the pressure on dissent reached nearly all aspects of American society, with unjustified arrests, interrogations of demonstrators, a presence of FBI agents on college campuses, libraries forced to inform federal authorities about books patrons checked out, citizens removed or arrested from malls for wearing “peace” T-shirts, with students and teachers censored from schools and universities.  While those acts are blatantly unconstitutional, the Patriot Act allows for unprecedented state surveillance, signed literally weeks after the terrorist bombings with virtually no public debate, and with vast public approval, many believing it would help authorities track down the enemies living amongst us, yet it led to routine mistreatment of citizens, no longer accorded civil liberties, as anyone could become a suspect in the war on terrorism.  Open suspicion by police is an underlying theme of the film, as anyone displaying Arab descent is immediately viewed as a criminal, openly mistreated, denied any rights, with ordinary citizens showing little concern for what they routinely see happening.  In fact, despite being intimidated and tied up by the robbers, threatened to be killed, none of the hostages show any willingness to cooperate with police, as Lee cleverly shows New Yorkers are hardly united behind law enforcement.  This film borrows from 80’s film noir, like Michael Mann’s Thief (1981), or William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA (1985), including an expressionistic use of architecture, a restrained color palette, exaggerated and dramatic shadows and silhouettes, with a giant American flag draped over the New York Stock Exchange building.  One of the talks between Frazier and Madeleine White takes place in front of a mural of the American flag, with the stripes replaced by the words “We will never forget.”  With a screen time of just seconds, happening during a furious rush of excitement, many never recall even seeing this blatant visual cue, while a discussion among hostages attempts to evaluate whether the robbers could be terrorists, with one emphatically denouncing that prospect, a Columbia professor, a lawyer with experience in these matters, claiming they are simply robbers.  Again, while brief, this connects the film to 9/11, educating the audience that robbers are different than terrorists, proven by the fact that they all get out of there alive.  What we’ve really learned from this bank fiasco is that the system is corrupt, that news reports barely touch the surface, as only a few involved actually know what happened, with the real crime remaining hidden under layers of subterfuge, shrouded in ambiguity, yet Frazier has the wherewithal to see it through, turning him into a neo-noir hero, reminiscent of Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes in CHINATOWN (1974), where his moral ambiguity is hidden by Denzel Washington’s charismatic performance.  At the time of the film’s release, it was viewed almost exclusively as an electrifying commercial thriller, with little else read into it.  As a result, while much has been written about Spike Lee’s films overall, very little critical evaluation has been written about this particular film among researchers or critics alike.  While the thriller aspect is well-made, suspenseful, and holds our interest throughout an anxious 24-hour day, from the morning of the heist until the next morning, with a few bleached-out hostage interrogation scenes that are told out of order, it’s the unpredictable people factor that rises above other similar films, such as the story of the beat cop who discovered the robbery in progress, Sergeant Collins (Victor Colicchio), who later tells Frazier the story of how a gun was first pointed in his face, using pointedly racial imagery, or the actions of the police SWAT team, treating all innocent hostages just like criminals, especially those fitting Arabic profiles, or an interesting turn of events which requires, of all things, an Albanian translator, who negotiates her services only if her basketful of parking tickets can disappear.  These little slice-of-life interludes humanize this otherwise typical genre film, yet the movie changes gears and moods when it gives way to subtextual commentary about the corrupt foundation of global capitalism, including racial and cultural tensions associated with globalized problems, like the formation of an international workforce.  As an aside, Frazier distinguishes himself by being so much in touch with the multi-ethnic sounds of the street, rising to an art form, while the clueless and out of touch language of the rich white suits at the top, such as the interplay between the mayor, Foster, or Plummer, the proverbial “powers that be,” stands in stark contrast, speaking the language of Wall Street.  Seemingly lifeless and inert, a vague, empty aspect of an empowered culture, where you wonder who they could possibly speak for in terms of representation, yet this speaks volumes about the cultural divide, as they are products of a privileged elite, not really in touch with the common man, which is just another distinguishing aspect of the film, and part of the intelligence and skillful pacing that is established throughout.  However, the coolness factor of both Owen and Washington is superb in a test of wills between two indomitable characters, while brewing just under the surface are wheels in motion where they could easily fly off the handle at any second, yet both maintain a charming wit and calm that perhaps no one else in the business could provide.  

12 Years a Slave

12 YEARS A SLAVE              B-                   

Great Britain  USA  (134 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Steve McQueen          Official site

I can speak of Slavery only so far as it came under my own observation—only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person.  My object is, to give a candid and truthful statement of facts: to repeat the story of my life, without exaggeration, leaving it for others to determine, whether even the pages of fiction present a picture of more cruel wrong or a severer bondage.

—Solomon Northrup, 12 Years a Slave, 1853

The world has still not come to terms with the slavery issue, as it continues in various forms, such as the trafficking of underage sex slave rings in a criminally underground Asian black market.  But the historical implications of the African slave trade from the 16th through to the 19th centuries remains thoroughly grounded in emotional hysteria as far as American movies are concerned, as the only way these stories are told, if at all, is to melodramatically elevate the misery so it’s nearly unwatchable, then afterwards overpraise the film as a way of overcompensating for the nation’s surprising disinterest in the subject.  Since the Civil Rights era, little has changed to alter the sheer ignorance this nation suffers on racial matters, where despite being a racially diverse country overall, the large majority of the country never lives with or mingles with persons from other races, where in some states you can live there literally for years without ever seeing a person of color.  So while laws have been passed and school textbooks updated, they remain largely ignored, as they matter little in the everyday ordinary lives of most people, as they continue to live separately and lead segregated lives.  Races are brought together in the military, civil service jobs, or in racially mixed schools, but even then they tend to separate by race.  What does this tell us?  Only that we continue to ignore this issue overall, and with our first black President, it has a way of rearing its ugly head so that even good intentions are misread and given hateful implications, continually believing that no good can ever come out of racial harmony.

You’d think Nelson Mandela’s inspirational rise from serving a 27-year prison sentence during the Apartheid era in South Africa to becoming the nation’s first black President at the age of 76, showing no malice towards those who imprisoned him all those years, would be inspiration enough for the world to take note and rethink its views on race.  But that would make too much sense, while racism is an insidious disease that spreads throughout society out of sheer ignorance, where often even the educated haven’t a clue.  While this film is receiving plenty of accolades, it unfortunately doesn’t deserve them, as the film does next to nothing to elevate the discussion, and instead turns racial injustice into a depiction of psychopathic hysteria, as if only crazy people owned slaves, driven by psychotic sadistic delusions about superiority and property ownership, where the movie mindset is continually stuck in this stereotypical realm of inflicting as much misery on the audience, as if this represents dramatic or historical truth.  When it comes to slavery, subtlety is never a possibility, as instead the audience is hammered over the head with neverending images of cruelty and torture, really not much different than standard Hollywood action thrillers, but then the film is prefaced by the favored phrase, “based on a true story,” which suggests it’s all in the name of truth, which hides the fact it’s more likely about the almighty dollar, where truth and melodrama are often confused as one and the same. 

Steve McQueen is no slouch as a black British director, winner of a Turner Prize and the maker of the exquisite film HUNGER (2008) about the 1981 Irish hunger strike when one by one Irish prisoners were allowed to die in prison for a political cause in order for the British to absurdly prove a non-existent point that they were not political prisoners, prompting international media attention when 10 prisoners starved themselves to death, including their leader Bobby Sands who was elected as a Member of Parliament while in prison, a thoroughly complex film that at its center becomes a twenty-minute uninterrupted dramatic scene between Sands and a Catholic priest arguing the moral principles.  Why that film is hauntingly dramatic and this film is emotionally stagnant most likely lies in the way the subjects are portrayed, as one has a life or death urgency, while the other uses familiar movie stereotypes to accentuate the punishment.  In HUNGER, through a build-up of meticulous detail, it’s about a clarity of vision elevating the material, while in 12 YEARS A SLAVE, it’s about the misery inflicted, even more grisly than it was portrayed in ROOTS (1976), a made-for-TV miniseries that was made 35 years ago, becoming yet another example of the latest trend for the movies to utilize torture porn.  The problem with McQueen’s film is that it offers us nothing new, with slavery defining blacks as inferior and sub-human, telling us what we already know using the same stereotypical images of plantation slavery, where the grueling experience is exaggerated to epic proportions by the sheer cruelty of the slaveowners.  

While this film is based on free blacks being kidnapped into slavery, only this one example is cited, lending no historical perspective whatsoever, as there’s no mention of other American citizens facing similar abductions, so the audience hasn’t a clue how often this happened.  It appears to be a rare instance, and especially fortunate that Solomon just happened to be assigned to work with a liberal thinking white man (Brad Pitt), the only instance of slaves assigned to work side-by-side with whites in the entire picture.  Even the actions of the local sheriff in offering such little resistance and obeying a “Yankee law” seems far-fetched, as even one-hundred years later Southern governors were notoriously defying government imposed laws that differentiated with their highly prized concept of race and state’s rights.  Better films on slavery would be Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of the Toni Morrison novel in the film BELOVED (1998) which uses the supernatural as a near religious, transcendent experience in order to comprehend the depths of grief and trauma involved, while Pierre Yves-Borgeaud’s RETURN TO GORÉE (2007) follows Senegalese singer/songwriter Youssou N'Dour on a jazz pilgrimage, recognizing the music of jazz is a byproduct of slavery, tracing the origins to the original slave routes in Africa where many of the same complicated rhythms can still be heard by musicians on the streets, as music is again used as a transcendent experience, where the chilling horrors of slavery are poetically rendered while offering a remarkable gesture of grace and human reconciliation.  

Chiwetel Ejiofor is excellent as Solomon Northrup, a free black man living in the north in 1841 who was kidnapped and smuggled into slavery in the deep South, based on a book that’s a hundred and sixty years old, originally published in 1853, turning into a Pinocchio story where his role in the movie is basically to witness and/or endure every last bit of human depravity associated with slavery, which has a way of deadening one’s humanity in order to preserve the plantation way of life for white slaveowners.  Interestingly both male and female slaveowners inflict with equal measure the same horrifically brutal punishments, at times hanged or beaten to death, where slaves are relentlessly attacked under one hideously sadistic assault after another, supposedly proving a point about power and superiority.  While the dehumanization depicted in Pinocchio becomes a moral tale on discovering one’s true humanity, not so here, as slavery remains mired in barbaric treatment, where the picture assumes viewers need to relive this experience for themselves and suffer the same indignities and savagery that is connected to slavery.  The problem is the director never elevates the material above the hellish conditions, keeping the viewer imprisoned in the most demoralizing mindset possible, so the entire film is a portrait of that hell.  Like a plethora of Holocaust films that all tap into the same feeling of wretched misery, this is another venture into unending and unimaginable horrors, though it is beautifully photographed and artfully presented, not that this framing technique in any way enhances or detracts from the experience, as it remains pure and utter miserablism, an artform unto itself.