When They See Us (2019)

Sometimes the way they organize things over at IMDb is a little baffling. The stack of credits for Ava DuVernay, for example, starts with "Miscellaneous Crew," where she is listed on some 99 movies, usually in a publicity or promotional capacity. Her first feature-length picture as a director (found down below 23 movies as producer, 16 as writer, and then 22 as director, so it isn't ordered by numbers) is a documentary from 2008 about Los Angeles hip-hop, This Is the Life. The first picture by her I know is Selma, from 2014, which was excellent, and now this Netflix miniseries docudrama about the notorious Central Park 5 miscarriage of justice. Well, we've all been thinking about miscarriages of justice lately. I mention DuVernay's PR background because it clarified something for me about her heartfelt style—she's here to win you over. She wants to knock you out of your complacency, whether by charm or blunt force. Executive producers on When They See Us include Robert De Niro and Oprah Winfrey, which conveniently denotes a spectrum across this engrossing five-hour production. It breaks your heart with bottomless institutional cruelty and harrowing prison scenes and it uplifts with simple examples of human faith, dignity, and kindness, often tear-dimmed as they go down. When They See Us reminded me of an overlong Law & Order episode. It's set in New York City and draws on much the same theatrical pool to round out the cast—I recognized a few faces specifically from the show—but also because this is a legal case involving both police and courts with major twists and turns. You can't make this stuff up, as they say. In fact, I think people still need to be reminded that the five Harlem kids charged and found guilty of the brutal rape and beating of the Central Park jogger in 1989 were fully exonerated in 2002. They never did it. Yes, there are people like Donald Trump who still believe they are guilty and should be executed. But look at who Donald Trump is. And, among other things, this miniseries debunks their theory of the case, which is that the serial killer who confessed to it and similar crimes from that time, and left a mountain of physical evidence to corroborate the confession, was actually the sixth man involved, with the others and their confused stories somehow leaving no physical trace. DuVernay can't resist the impulse for some score-settling on the point, which is fair enough (given who we know Donald Trump is), but these days the less I see of Fat Bastard the better. DuVernay, who also cowrote, wisely stays closest to the boys most of the time, their families and their experiences. Their stories are all bad, but one, Korey Wise's, is worse than the others. It's hard to watch When They See Us, the injustice is so monstrous. It's hard to see what happened to these five men. But seeing them is ultimately the point of this exercise and it's worth the pain, which is only an echo of theirs. We all need to do more seeing.

Selma (2014)

UK / USA, 128 minutes
Director: Ava DuVernay
Writer: Paul Webb
Photography: Bradford Young
Editor: Spencer Averick
Cast: David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Tom Wilkinson, Andre Holland, Omar J. Dorsey, Alessandro Nivola, Giovanni Ribisi, Colman Domingo, Oprah Winfrey, Common, Keith Stanfield, Dylan Baker, Tim Roth, Lorraine Toussaint, Wendell Pierce, Cuba Gooding Jr., Martin Sheen

Late in 2012, days or even hours after the election of Barack Obama to a second term as president of the United States, it became apparent very little was going to be done in the coming four years. Opponents of Obama, never that inclined to accept the legitimacy of his constituency, simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of him. And though they uniformly and indignantly deny it, even as they hit the forward button on the latest email collection of watermelon jokes, their decision to continue criticizing and obstructing Obama at every turn has much less to do with the content of his character (let alone the policies, which all too often originated with them in the first place) and everything to do with the color of his skin.

Just so, the second half of Obama's presidency has morphed inevitably into a long and painful stasis of enforced meditation on race relations in America, focusing on issues such as gun violence, police brutality, drug laws, and the persistent racial inequities of the criminal justice system. Hollywood has chipped in too, churning out an informal trilogy on the subject in the form of Oscar-bait: first there was Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, which focused on the enormous difficulties of putting a legal end to slavery. Then there was 12 Years a Slave, which provided a useful profile of exactly that slavery. To nitpick a little, I think 12 Years should have come first, not just because an honest movie about slavery was so grossly overdue, but because it puts into appalling relief the urgency of ending slavery as an institution, and thus the shame of the politicians in Lincoln who resisted it even for a minute, let alone more than two centuries to that point. Last comes Selma, advancing the timeline of this narrative a full century, for a look at how slowly and insignificantly anything is changing. This little snapshot of progress is exactly what Martin Luther King meant when he said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Emphasis on long.