Life and art blur in jail theatre symphony
SING SING
★★★★
In cinemas; Cert 15A
John “Divine G” Whitfield (Colman Domingo) is serving a sentence at Sing Sing, a maximum-security correctional facility in New York. When he’s not continuing a campaign from behind bars to appeal his sentence and prove his innocence, he’s the linchpin of a theatre troupe facilitated by prison authorities.
This is the Rehabilitation Through Arts (RTA) programme, in which prisoners are given purpose and expression through the performing arts. A new production is being scripted by course mentor Brent (Sound of Metal’s Paul Raci) – a barmy time-jumping play that will blend elements of Shakespeare and pantomime.
To pull it off, Divine G and fellow theatre accomplice Mike Mike (Sean San Jose) need to cajole a fellow inmate to help make up the numbers.
Enter Clarence Maclin (played by himself), a lupine prison-yard hustler who grew up on the mean streets. The only reason he signed up for the programme was to get near the women who will eventually share the stage in the final production.
But Divine G sees that this thrower of shapes – a person who every day has to don a threatening guise in order to impose himself on the other convicts – has some of the acting toolkit already to hand.
The environment all around is one of pain, dehumanisation and shame, where trees and hills sit tantalisingly on the near-horizon and loved ones on the outside become more and more estranged. And yet, Clarence slowly finds his defences being broken down by the circle of other men all focused on bringing to life characters on a page for a common goal.
For the first time in his life he is encountering support in this place of dog-eat-dog, as well as an emotional vocabulary where brutality and frustration more commonly hold sway.
If prison dramas teach us anything, however, it’s that fairy tales don’t come easy here. While the rehearsals and workshopping buoy Clarence’s sense of self-worth and a strong fraternity with his fellow cast members, everyone still returns to their cells at the end of the session to face whatever demons they had temporary reprieve from.
There is much food for thought in this sensitively handled biopic from director Greg Kwedar that dispenses with genre tropes to show us something that is “real-world” redemptive. Kwedar was a co-writer on 2021’s Jockey, and utilises a similar docu-drama style here to impressive effect.
Shot on location in just twoand-a-half weeks, nothing feels overworked or forced into being during a slim, trim 105-minute runtime. Even at those moments where Divine’s personal turmoil threatens to spill over into mawkishness or when Bryce Dessner’s score is coming on just a bit too thick, Kwedar and Domingo just about manage to pull things back.
The strong naturalistic seam is by design, it turns out. Many of the co-stars orbiting Domingo (a kinetic screen presence throughout) are actual former prisoners, men whose lives were changed by the RTA programme. Not only do they sit snuggly in the screen action as real, skilled actors, but their authenticity breathes a strange immediacy to everything we’re seeing, as if this film is a logical extension of the real-life events it is based on.
Actors playing themselves becoming actors in the most unlikely of settings – that might be what Sing Sing shows us but this is really a saga about the roles we all adopt to get through the day.
It becomes difficult, therefore, not to ponder the value of such programmes in the prison system, something that the filmmakers and Domingo (an executive producer, as well as someone whose career began in educational theatre) have been at pains to stress during recent interviews. If it worked there, where else could it work? Maclin’s performance is so visceral, unmannered, and tactile – what other considerable talent might currently be languishing in some penitentiary, written off by society as beyond rehabilitation?
On a surface level, Pat Scola’s cinematography coats everything in a classy 16mm grain that, until we hear mention of a cell phone a third of the way in, lulls us back in time a few decades to the heyday of “social message” dramas by the likes of Sidney Lumet.
Hollywood isn’t falling over itself these days to make grownup films that tackle daunting systemic ills in US society, especially ones with such a throwback grit to them. If anything can revive the fashion, this can.
ODDITY
★★★
In cinemas; Cert 15A
Damian McCarthy knows his way around a decent fright. There are, perhaps, too many holes in this knotted chiller from the award-winning Irish filmmaker – but there are some fabulous scares, too, and we mustn’t take those for granted.
A woman named Dani (Carolyn Bracken) is murdered at her home in rural Ireland. On the eve of the first anniversary, Dani’s psychiatrist husband Ted (Gwilym Lee) visits her twin sister Darcy (also Bracken) at her oddities shop in town.
Darcy is a blind medium, but Ted doesn’t believe in ghosts. He’s here to check in, to share news of his new partner and to let Darcy know that she’s always welcome for dinner. Sort of. The following week, Darcy shows up unannounced with a terrifying wooden mannequin in tow. Things get spectacularly weird.
Spooky but uneven, Oddity’s internal logic is murky, at best, and McCarthy’s film sometimes talks itself into a corner, like a short story that’s been stretched too far. But it’s never boring, and this witty, wicked horror unnerved me in ways that I wasn’t expecting. Oh, and the finale will stay with you for days. Get on it.
Chris Wasser
TOUCH
★★★★★
In cinemas; Cert 12A
Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur takes a step back from the actioners (Two Guns, Everest, etc) for this sedately powerful romantic saga about closure.
It tells of Kristofer (Egill Olafsson), a widower whose ailing health spurs him to set out from Reykjavik and find the one that got away. Arriving in London on the eve of the pandemic, he is cast back five decades to when, as a disillusioned college dropout, he worked in a Japanese bar.
In tenderly appointed flashbacks, we see young Kristofer (Kormakur’s son Palmi) fall not only for Japanese culture but also for the boss’s beautiful daughter Miko (played by Japanese pop star Koki). Love blooms between the pair, but an unspoken trauma sits just behind Miko and her kind father (Masahiro Motoki).
When Kristofer arrives at work one day to find the restaurant shut and the family returned to Japan, it becomes the life-long heartache he now seeks to resolve in the winter of his years.
Between its braided time frames, novelistic pace, and beautiful cast, Touch is an uncommonly poignant drama that balances rich sentimentality with more harrowing themes. Only cynics will resist a swoon or three.
Hilary White
CLOSE TO YOU
★★
Selected cinemas; Cert TBC Admirable yet awkward, Dominic Savage’s chilly character study struggles from the outset.
We cannot fault its star, Elliot Page. The esteemed Canadian performer, hasn’t been this good in years and the Juno star developed the story for Close to You alongside his director.
Page plays Sam, a Torontobased trans man preparing for his first trip home in four years. It’s his father’s birthday and the family hasn’t seen Sam since he transitioned. They’re a big gang and mum and dad are good eggs.
Alas, someone in the mix has a rotten attitude and there is always an issue, always an argument. Elsewhere, on the train home, Sam runs into an old friend (Hillary Baack’s Katherine) who used to occupy a special place in his heart. She might still do.
Savage’s cast improvised most of their dialogue, and it shows. The British filmmaker is famous for this sort of thing, but it doesn’t work here, and it makes Close to You sound like a film that hasn’t yet figured out what it wants to say.
Page is wonderful, but the story around him feels underdeveloped and annoyingly unfocused. A real shame.
Chris Wasser