Chris Knipp
08-19-2024, 01:24 AM
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20sngg.jpg
COLEMAN DOMINGO AND EX-PRISOER CAST OF SING SING
GREG KWEDAR: SING SING (2023)
Powerhouse film about how art can heal in prison
The New Yorker's new critic Justin Chang's review (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/22/sing-sing-movie-review) of Sing Sing quite properly begins with a list of other movies about playwriting and theater programs in prisons. There are more than he lists, and he forgets to mention Rick Cluchey, the prisoner who became a major interpreter of Beckett's plays. He mentions the 1987 Weeds, starring Nick Nolte as a prisoner whose plays got him a pardon, and quotes Pauline Kael's comment, which he says could apply to Sing Sing. She said the picture "never goes very far into the issues it raises, but the messy collision of energies keeps a viewer feeling alive." That is what happens here, for sure. Yet this may be the best acted film so far that shows how art, particularly drama, can heal in prison.
This film is absorbing and intense, but hard to pin down. The same could be said about a semi-hybrid 2012 Italian film directed by the Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio, Caesar Must Die (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2199) (mentioned in Chang's list, it was part of that year's New York Film Festival), which was about the rehearsing and presenting of an Italian prison production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in a motley, colorful version where each actor translated his speeches into his own southern Italian dialect. The film was harmed by a clumsy mix of real and artificial staged action, and never quite came together. Sing Sing does.
It's thanks to a fantastic cast, plus shooting in prisons (not just one), and the experience of collaborators Kwedar and Bentley as volunteer teachers at correctional facilities. The dramatic cornerstone is Coleman Domingo (of last year's Rustin), who plays Clarence (Divine Eye) Maclin, formerly in Sing Sing sentenced to 25 years to life for a murder he swears he did not commit. The real Divine Eye appears in a cameo, an older man now. In prison, as seen here, he was widely respected as an accomplished jailhouse lawyer, working on his own and others' defense, and also wrote novels and plays and cofounded RTA, Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a program long used in the New York prison system. The focus here is something there was an Esquire article about, "The Sing Sing Follies (A Maximum Security Comedy)" by John Richardson. Brent Buell, an volunteer participant in the theater program at Sing Sing (played by the excellent Paul Raci of The Sound of Metal - an Oscar nominee like Domingo) who wrote a sort of omnibus time-travel comedy that has Roman gladiators, Robin Hood, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hamlet and song and dance numbers in it, something for everyone, and put it on with participants in the RTA program at Sing Sing. We never get to more than glimpse this play (though we do see short clips of the actual production at the end). There's no certainty that it made a particle of sense - but, it has that Esquire article (https://www.brentbuell.com/EsquireArticle100105.pdf) to certify it.
What gives Coleman Domingo someone to spar with dramatically is a powerful newcomer, one of at least half a dozen cast members who are playing themselves and are formerly incarcerated RTA theater program participants. They're all solid and intense. Only one is a principal character, Clarence (Divine Eye) Maclin, played by himeelf, who stands out. Divine G pulls him into the theater group, based on his dramatic "performance" menacing a white boy in the prison yard who owes him for a drug score, plus a knowing reference to King Lear.. "He knows poetry," says Divine G.
The two Divines, G and Eye, are a dramatic pairing in the film whose power equation goes back and forth like a duo - Nag and Nell, Ham and Clov - in a Beckett play. The magnanimous inclusion of the new Divine Eye by Divine G backfires because he sabotages G's plan to have his own play put on, in favor of a comedy (despite their just having put on A Midsummer Night's Dream), and Buell, the non-prisoner facilitator, steps in to pen as well s dircct that. Then - no surprise - Divine Eye turns out to be so angry and aggressive it's hard to use him in this collective enterprise, even though he also gets to play the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet that Divine G thought would be his; he gets to play a Roman gladiator instead. Then the more experienced Divine G, after one more apparently failed appeal for clemency, which is well dramatized. (though it's a familiar trope), goes into a tremendous funk and he throws off his grownup mantle for a while and begins acting out, walking off, refusing to rehearse. In the process of all this, the two Divines bond, and learn to call each other "beloved," which is what the RTA participants have learned to use instead of "nigger." This substitution becomes one of the most thought-provoking bits we carry away from the film.
The methodology of Brent as drama coach-director works like a coach in a sports movie. He gets the crew to perform exercises and feeds them mantras like "respect the process" (repeated often) and "don't act; listen." Some of these are pretty Micky-Mouse. But one scene, where they're asked one by one to think of a peaceful, happy place and describe it to the group, glows and almost explodes with humanity. It's a glimpse, perhaps, of what this movie might have been. But the other inmates besides the two Divines only rarely enter the spotlight.
In the end things turn out well, and the upbeat finale has drawn widespread criticism. What can be said is that theater programs in prisons, and RTA, have a proven good result. They don't just keep a few prisoners busy and involved and periodically entertain the prison population (the best of all "captive audiences"). Statistics show that the recidivism rate of RTA participants is minuscule compared to the general prison population. But what doesn't come out is the hopelessness and waste of the US carceral system, which Sean San José, one of the main cast members, has spoken of pointedly in festival Q&As.
Everyone in this movie is first rate. Director Kwedar and his collaborator Clint Bentley have used the hybrid docu-drama method they applied in their sensitive 2021 race track world study Jockey (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4851). But as Chang writes, in thst film as well as this new one, "they can’t resist an old-fashioned redemption arc, replete with hard luck, perseverance, and a sentimental finish." In Jockey it was easier to move around and when you think of the film you think of the whole racetrack ambiance. Even though Sing Sing works hard through the hand held photography of dp Pat Scola works to create a vérité effect of an intense, dangerous environment and at times really achieves that, you don't feel like you're in a prison. Paul Raci's description of the location shoot in prison shows they felt they were incarcerated, so much of the focus is on the theater workshopping, alternating only with a few personal scenes - and a terrible tragedy, not due exactly to the prison, this is a portrait of the workshop, and of these two men, not of prison life. But what were they trying to do? Well, one thing they are sure to have done is garner some Academy Award nominations.
SIng Sing, 105 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 10, 2023, also included in at least 20 other mostly US festivals, also Toronto and Jerusalem. The US limited theatrical release by A24 began Jul. 12, 2024. Screened for this review at AMC Kabuki 8 in San Francisco Aug. 18, 2024. Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/sing-sing/) rating: 85%.
COLEMAN DOMINGO AND EX-PRISOER CAST OF SING SING
GREG KWEDAR: SING SING (2023)
Powerhouse film about how art can heal in prison
The New Yorker's new critic Justin Chang's review (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/22/sing-sing-movie-review) of Sing Sing quite properly begins with a list of other movies about playwriting and theater programs in prisons. There are more than he lists, and he forgets to mention Rick Cluchey, the prisoner who became a major interpreter of Beckett's plays. He mentions the 1987 Weeds, starring Nick Nolte as a prisoner whose plays got him a pardon, and quotes Pauline Kael's comment, which he says could apply to Sing Sing. She said the picture "never goes very far into the issues it raises, but the messy collision of energies keeps a viewer feeling alive." That is what happens here, for sure. Yet this may be the best acted film so far that shows how art, particularly drama, can heal in prison.
This film is absorbing and intense, but hard to pin down. The same could be said about a semi-hybrid 2012 Italian film directed by the Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio, Caesar Must Die (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2199) (mentioned in Chang's list, it was part of that year's New York Film Festival), which was about the rehearsing and presenting of an Italian prison production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in a motley, colorful version where each actor translated his speeches into his own southern Italian dialect. The film was harmed by a clumsy mix of real and artificial staged action, and never quite came together. Sing Sing does.
It's thanks to a fantastic cast, plus shooting in prisons (not just one), and the experience of collaborators Kwedar and Bentley as volunteer teachers at correctional facilities. The dramatic cornerstone is Coleman Domingo (of last year's Rustin), who plays Clarence (Divine Eye) Maclin, formerly in Sing Sing sentenced to 25 years to life for a murder he swears he did not commit. The real Divine Eye appears in a cameo, an older man now. In prison, as seen here, he was widely respected as an accomplished jailhouse lawyer, working on his own and others' defense, and also wrote novels and plays and cofounded RTA, Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a program long used in the New York prison system. The focus here is something there was an Esquire article about, "The Sing Sing Follies (A Maximum Security Comedy)" by John Richardson. Brent Buell, an volunteer participant in the theater program at Sing Sing (played by the excellent Paul Raci of The Sound of Metal - an Oscar nominee like Domingo) who wrote a sort of omnibus time-travel comedy that has Roman gladiators, Robin Hood, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hamlet and song and dance numbers in it, something for everyone, and put it on with participants in the RTA program at Sing Sing. We never get to more than glimpse this play (though we do see short clips of the actual production at the end). There's no certainty that it made a particle of sense - but, it has that Esquire article (https://www.brentbuell.com/EsquireArticle100105.pdf) to certify it.
What gives Coleman Domingo someone to spar with dramatically is a powerful newcomer, one of at least half a dozen cast members who are playing themselves and are formerly incarcerated RTA theater program participants. They're all solid and intense. Only one is a principal character, Clarence (Divine Eye) Maclin, played by himeelf, who stands out. Divine G pulls him into the theater group, based on his dramatic "performance" menacing a white boy in the prison yard who owes him for a drug score, plus a knowing reference to King Lear.. "He knows poetry," says Divine G.
The two Divines, G and Eye, are a dramatic pairing in the film whose power equation goes back and forth like a duo - Nag and Nell, Ham and Clov - in a Beckett play. The magnanimous inclusion of the new Divine Eye by Divine G backfires because he sabotages G's plan to have his own play put on, in favor of a comedy (despite their just having put on A Midsummer Night's Dream), and Buell, the non-prisoner facilitator, steps in to pen as well s dircct that. Then - no surprise - Divine Eye turns out to be so angry and aggressive it's hard to use him in this collective enterprise, even though he also gets to play the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet that Divine G thought would be his; he gets to play a Roman gladiator instead. Then the more experienced Divine G, after one more apparently failed appeal for clemency, which is well dramatized. (though it's a familiar trope), goes into a tremendous funk and he throws off his grownup mantle for a while and begins acting out, walking off, refusing to rehearse. In the process of all this, the two Divines bond, and learn to call each other "beloved," which is what the RTA participants have learned to use instead of "nigger." This substitution becomes one of the most thought-provoking bits we carry away from the film.
The methodology of Brent as drama coach-director works like a coach in a sports movie. He gets the crew to perform exercises and feeds them mantras like "respect the process" (repeated often) and "don't act; listen." Some of these are pretty Micky-Mouse. But one scene, where they're asked one by one to think of a peaceful, happy place and describe it to the group, glows and almost explodes with humanity. It's a glimpse, perhaps, of what this movie might have been. But the other inmates besides the two Divines only rarely enter the spotlight.
In the end things turn out well, and the upbeat finale has drawn widespread criticism. What can be said is that theater programs in prisons, and RTA, have a proven good result. They don't just keep a few prisoners busy and involved and periodically entertain the prison population (the best of all "captive audiences"). Statistics show that the recidivism rate of RTA participants is minuscule compared to the general prison population. But what doesn't come out is the hopelessness and waste of the US carceral system, which Sean San José, one of the main cast members, has spoken of pointedly in festival Q&As.
Everyone in this movie is first rate. Director Kwedar and his collaborator Clint Bentley have used the hybrid docu-drama method they applied in their sensitive 2021 race track world study Jockey (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4851). But as Chang writes, in thst film as well as this new one, "they can’t resist an old-fashioned redemption arc, replete with hard luck, perseverance, and a sentimental finish." In Jockey it was easier to move around and when you think of the film you think of the whole racetrack ambiance. Even though Sing Sing works hard through the hand held photography of dp Pat Scola works to create a vérité effect of an intense, dangerous environment and at times really achieves that, you don't feel like you're in a prison. Paul Raci's description of the location shoot in prison shows they felt they were incarcerated, so much of the focus is on the theater workshopping, alternating only with a few personal scenes - and a terrible tragedy, not due exactly to the prison, this is a portrait of the workshop, and of these two men, not of prison life. But what were they trying to do? Well, one thing they are sure to have done is garner some Academy Award nominations.
SIng Sing, 105 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 10, 2023, also included in at least 20 other mostly US festivals, also Toronto and Jerusalem. The US limited theatrical release by A24 began Jul. 12, 2024. Screened for this review at AMC Kabuki 8 in San Francisco Aug. 18, 2024. Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/sing-sing/) rating: 85%.