Mangrove; Lovers Rock; Red, White and Blue; Alex Wheatle; Education; UK, 407 minutes
Director: Steve McQueen
Writers: Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Steve McQueen, Alastair Siddons, Courttia Newland
Photography: Shabier Kirchner
Music: Mica Levi
Editors: Chris Dickens, Steve McQueen
Cast: Letitia White, Shaun Parkes, Malachi Kirby, Rochenda Sandall, Gershwyn Eustache Jnr., Gary Beadle, Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn, Micheal Ward, Shaniqua Okwok, Francis Lovehall, Kedar Williams-Stirling, John Boyega, Steve Toussaint, Antonia Thomas, Tyrone Huntley, Sheyi Cole, Robbie Gee, Jonathan Jules, Elliot Edusah, Fumilayo Brown-Olateju, Kenyah Sandy, Sharlene Whyte, Tamara Lawrance, Josette Simon, Ryan Masher
“Small axe” is a reference to a Bob Marley song of the same name, with the line “If you are the big tree, we are the small axe.” It’s another way of talking about incrementalism, in line with Martin Luther King’s “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And just so, director Steve McQueen with screenwriters Courttia Newland and Alastair Siddons have examined that arc closely as it applied to West Indians living in Britain in the late ‘60s, ‘70s, and early ‘80s. You might think the British are immune from racism, too genteel or something, but Small Axe and the five distinct films clustered under that banner beg to differ. They remind us not only that the British are the authors of a specific type of racism but that in large part the US digested it whole. The police brutality in Small Axe—one of the few constants across these stories—looks a lot like the police brutality we see in the US. It’s one of our inheritances from Britain, however much we rebelled against it in other ways.
The favorite of these stories in Small Axe by acclaim is almost certainly the second (though they do not need to be looked at in any order), Lovers Rock. In all the episodes music is a saving grace, a lifeline, and a solace and true source of joy, but nowhere is that emphasized more than in Lovers Rock, which is a straightforward depiction of a house party and its motley of attendees. The prep takes all day. The food looks amazingly good, most are dressed up in their best, and the music is everything. Two scenes—one involving “Silly Games” by Janet Kay and the other an unidentified dub rave-up played over and over—illustrate the point.
“Small axe” is a reference to a Bob Marley song of the same name, with the line “If you are the big tree, we are the small axe.” It’s another way of talking about incrementalism, in line with Martin Luther King’s “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And just so, director Steve McQueen with screenwriters Courttia Newland and Alastair Siddons have examined that arc closely as it applied to West Indians living in Britain in the late ‘60s, ‘70s, and early ‘80s. You might think the British are immune from racism, too genteel or something, but Small Axe and the five distinct films clustered under that banner beg to differ. They remind us not only that the British are the authors of a specific type of racism but that in large part the US digested it whole. The police brutality in Small Axe—one of the few constants across these stories—looks a lot like the police brutality we see in the US. It’s one of our inheritances from Britain, however much we rebelled against it in other ways.
The favorite of these stories in Small Axe by acclaim is almost certainly the second (though they do not need to be looked at in any order), Lovers Rock. In all the episodes music is a saving grace, a lifeline, and a solace and true source of joy, but nowhere is that emphasized more than in Lovers Rock, which is a straightforward depiction of a house party and its motley of attendees. The prep takes all day. The food looks amazingly good, most are dressed up in their best, and the music is everything. Two scenes—one involving “Silly Games” by Janet Kay and the other an unidentified dub rave-up played over and over—illustrate the point.
The music is provided in the Jamaican sound system style, with a crew in a living room spinning 45s through a set of homemade speakers. In both cases they stop playing records entirely at a point and the crowd carries on without them. In the case of “Silly Games” they sing the chorus multiple times. It sounds like an eerie chant and they are not afraid to go for Kay’s high notes—operatically high notes. In the case of the dub, it’s all men on the living room dance floor. It’s late in the party. The DJ plays the instrumental three times and the dancers never flag, even between. Though Lovers Rock comes as close as any to a pure expression of joy, it has dark and troubling undercurrents as well.
Mangrove is the first and the longest of the five, running over two hours. Most of the rest are closer to an hour. Based on the case of the Mangrove Nine, Mangrove tells the story of systematic police harassment aimed at a particular restaurant owner, who becomes as radicalized as a person can be who wants to do business uninterrupted in London at that time. But his restaurant becomes a community gathering place for people to talk over their problems (usually involving police), share support, and discuss how to deal with them. When they demonstrate publicly, they are set up for charges by the authorities and Mangrove turns into a courtroom drama. One thing I like about Small Axe is that you can often feel how steeped McQueen is in cinema, turning to its devices as necessary. Mangrove is as exciting, dramatic, and satisfying as any courtroom drama.
Police behavior in Small Axe is always infuriating, but perhaps not more so than in the third piece, Red, White and Blue. In this one a naïve but sincere young man elects to join the police force and try to change things from the inside. He announces these aims more often than he should, but even if he had been more discreet about it we see quickly he never had a chance. The white policemen he works with do not support him in any way, scrawling ugly words on his locker, abandoning him in dangerous situations, and smirking at his anger. The worst of all could be the police chief to whom he reports. McQueen and Newland create a depressing portrait of how deeply these problems with police run.
Alex Wheatle, the fourth episode, is about the real-life Wheatle, an outcast even among West Indians who was arrested and jailed for participating in the 1981 Brixton riot. Later he became a noted author of novels and YA novels as well as a one-man play, Uprising, based on his Brixton experience. This episode focuses on his time in prison, where he met a man, his cellmate, who influenced him to pursue an education. I like the way McQueen uses tried and true biopic strategies, but biopics are not my favorite and Alex Wheatle may be the weakest piece here—although that’s not such a criticism in this company and it has many fine points, usually, for me, associated with Wheatle’s interest in music.
The last piece, Education, takes on another time-honored cinematic tradition in an advocacy story that crusades convincingly for social justice. In this case it’s about a systematic practice in British public education of the time to shunt children of color off to “special schools,” or, as they were institutionally referred to, schools for the “educationally subnormal.” In these schools the children can be unsupervised most of the day. The teachers come and go. In one scene that is almost as comic as it is astonishingly inappropriate a teacher sits on his desk in front of the kids, smoking a cigarette and running through multiple verses of “The House of the Rising Sun.” In the tradition, Education lets you feel the outrage of the issue at hand and then the balm of an empathetic resolution.
My one complaint about Small Axe at the moment is that producers Amazon Prime have recently seen fit to include ads with the streaming version, and they are not the kind that are thoughtfully inserted. You’re watching Small Axe and, sometimes in the middle of a sentence of dialogue, the ads come busting in. I have the somewhat expensive DVD so I can escape that if I really want, but it just seems like a poor choice on Amazon’s part. Small Axe was one of the best things to come out of the pandemic and that whole terrible period. The music is always great, and each piece is close to coequal with all the others.
Top 10 of 2020
1. Small Axe
2. The History of the Seattle Mariners
3. Nomadland
4. Shiva Baby
5. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
6. Batman: Death in the Family
7. Minari
8. The Queen’s Gambit
9. Possessor
10. The Social Dilemma
Other write-ups: Borat Subsequent Moviefilm; The Boy Behind the Door; Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga; The Hunt; I’ll Be Gone in the Dark; The Last Dance; Lovecraft Country, s1; Relic; Riders of Justice; Shirley; Signs of a Psychopath, s1-6; Tenet; Zappa
Mangrove is the first and the longest of the five, running over two hours. Most of the rest are closer to an hour. Based on the case of the Mangrove Nine, Mangrove tells the story of systematic police harassment aimed at a particular restaurant owner, who becomes as radicalized as a person can be who wants to do business uninterrupted in London at that time. But his restaurant becomes a community gathering place for people to talk over their problems (usually involving police), share support, and discuss how to deal with them. When they demonstrate publicly, they are set up for charges by the authorities and Mangrove turns into a courtroom drama. One thing I like about Small Axe is that you can often feel how steeped McQueen is in cinema, turning to its devices as necessary. Mangrove is as exciting, dramatic, and satisfying as any courtroom drama.
Police behavior in Small Axe is always infuriating, but perhaps not more so than in the third piece, Red, White and Blue. In this one a naïve but sincere young man elects to join the police force and try to change things from the inside. He announces these aims more often than he should, but even if he had been more discreet about it we see quickly he never had a chance. The white policemen he works with do not support him in any way, scrawling ugly words on his locker, abandoning him in dangerous situations, and smirking at his anger. The worst of all could be the police chief to whom he reports. McQueen and Newland create a depressing portrait of how deeply these problems with police run.
Alex Wheatle, the fourth episode, is about the real-life Wheatle, an outcast even among West Indians who was arrested and jailed for participating in the 1981 Brixton riot. Later he became a noted author of novels and YA novels as well as a one-man play, Uprising, based on his Brixton experience. This episode focuses on his time in prison, where he met a man, his cellmate, who influenced him to pursue an education. I like the way McQueen uses tried and true biopic strategies, but biopics are not my favorite and Alex Wheatle may be the weakest piece here—although that’s not such a criticism in this company and it has many fine points, usually, for me, associated with Wheatle’s interest in music.
The last piece, Education, takes on another time-honored cinematic tradition in an advocacy story that crusades convincingly for social justice. In this case it’s about a systematic practice in British public education of the time to shunt children of color off to “special schools,” or, as they were institutionally referred to, schools for the “educationally subnormal.” In these schools the children can be unsupervised most of the day. The teachers come and go. In one scene that is almost as comic as it is astonishingly inappropriate a teacher sits on his desk in front of the kids, smoking a cigarette and running through multiple verses of “The House of the Rising Sun.” In the tradition, Education lets you feel the outrage of the issue at hand and then the balm of an empathetic resolution.
My one complaint about Small Axe at the moment is that producers Amazon Prime have recently seen fit to include ads with the streaming version, and they are not the kind that are thoughtfully inserted. You’re watching Small Axe and, sometimes in the middle of a sentence of dialogue, the ads come busting in. I have the somewhat expensive DVD so I can escape that if I really want, but it just seems like a poor choice on Amazon’s part. Small Axe was one of the best things to come out of the pandemic and that whole terrible period. The music is always great, and each piece is close to coequal with all the others.
Top 10 of 2020
1. Small Axe
2. The History of the Seattle Mariners
3. Nomadland
4. Shiva Baby
5. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
6. Batman: Death in the Family
7. Minari
8. The Queen’s Gambit
9. Possessor
10. The Social Dilemma
Other write-ups: Borat Subsequent Moviefilm; The Boy Behind the Door; Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga; The Hunt; I’ll Be Gone in the Dark; The Last Dance; Lovecraft Country, s1; Relic; Riders of Justice; Shirley; Signs of a Psychopath, s1-6; Tenet; Zappa
Thanks for the handy viewing list. I'll use it to look for my "free" Prime access to these titles on Amazon, with the annoyingly random ads. Google ads do this too; the disruptive randomness, I mean. We should have known when everything got to the internet that would come with some kind of catch. What I guess we couldn't anticipate was how many catches, big and small?! Only know your first two picks, which I loved. What stood out to me about Small Axe was how little of Black Britain has been put to film; or at least how little I've seen of it. And you're right the British Empire was always racist, when they weren't in a few instances trying to be less racist (abolition, etc); and nearly always urging the U.S. to shoulder "The White Man's Burden" with them. When Americans say the US is not a racist country what they really mean is that they think efforts to make the country less racist should be stopped (or undermined). The whole wide world is racist and bigoted as fuck, which I don't mean as a cop out. What matters most is when the world is trying to be less racist, like Small Axe.
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