THE FIRE INSIDE

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

The Fire Inside opens with an overhead drone shot of Ryan Destiny as Claressa Shields, as a preteen, future Olympic gold medal-winning boxer, jogging across town in Flint, Michigan, to a gym where she’s determined to learn to box. It’s a very effective establishing shot, in spite of how overused drone shots are in movies anymore. But this particular shot illustrates a key point in filmmaking, which is that the tool doesn’t matter so much as how it’s used.

I suppose the same could be same of Claressa herself (commonly referred to in the film as “Ressa”). After telling her he doesn’t train girls, coach Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry) sees something in her defiance after the boys he’s been training in the ring give her shit. He invites her into the ring, he gives her some pointers, she takes them on like a natural, and a great relationship is born.

This movie follows pretty standard sports movie story beats, until it doesn’t. Maybe two thirds of the way through, Claressa has worked her way through regional and national boxing championships, and ultimately gets her gold medal. (That’s not a spoiler, given that this is based on a true story.) But then the story jumps forward six months, and we see how Claressa has settled back into her life in Flint, little changed from her life before traveling the world. She resents her male athlete counterparts enjoying lucrative endorsements while those opportunities remain out of her reach.

The Fire Inside is directed by Rachel Morrison, in her feature film directorial debut—and she does an adequate, if not spectacular, job. She has many other credits as a cinematographer, most notably having shot Black Panther. She works with a different cinematographer here, Rina Yang, who brings a fresh visual perspective to a pretty standard genre. The script writer, though, is Barry Jenkins, who here seems to be tackling unusually standard fare compared to his previous work, having written and directed both the absolute masterpiece Moonlight and its follow-up, If Beale Street Could Talk. Both that and The Fire Inside are undeniably compelling and pretty to look at, but Moonlight is a tough act to follow.

The thing is, if you dig deep enough—some might even say nitpick—it’s fairly easy to find fault and flaws in The Fire Inside. Claressa’s mother, Jackie (Olunike Adeliyi), is depicted as a pretty bad mother at the beginning of the story, and gains some maternal instinct by the end, without us ever seeing how she got there. I was relieved to see her humanized, at least; it would have been easy to villainize her. Then there are Claressa’s siblings, including a sister who becomes a teen mother, a detail we are shown without any real connection to Claressa’s overall story.

And yet—there’s a lot in The Fire Inside that makes up for all of this. Ryan Destiny is fantastic in the lead part, portraying a teenager who is equal parts driven and petulant. Brian Tyree Henry is well cast as the father figure Claressa needs, although her father’s release from prison complicates the relationship (something this movie actually simplifies a bit, in a kind of Hollywood-movie way). The boxing scenes are staged well enough to make someone like me, who could not have the least bit of interest in boxing outside of a movie like this, invested in the outcome.

Although the story here focuses more on her first gold medal, her status as a singularly accomplished athlete is her second gold medal, which finally helped her accomplish some of the goals that seemed out of reach at first. Perhaps most notable of these is how she demanded that women Olympic athletes in training get the same stipend as the male athletes, who previously were given three times the amount women got. There’s a fair amount of feminist inspiration in The Fire Inside—let women get away with saying they enjoy beating people up!—and it feels notable that it has nothing to say about race in Claressa’s story. Perhaps I am jumping to conclusions that there is any need for it to, though. It’s enough that this is a film with a majority-Black cast with what feels like honest depictions of their community, including several allusions to Flint being a city that got unfairly ignored.

This is a flawed film with some narrative inconsistencies, and which I also really enjoyed watching. And an imperfect movie is a great hang, how much do the flaws matter?

You can ignore the bullshit if you keep your eye on the prize.

Overall: B

SING SING

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A
Cinematography: A+
Editing: A

Not to diminish the phenomenal performances or anything, but very early on in Sing Sing I thought to myself: I need to look up who the cinematographer was on this movie. It was Pat Scola, whose resume is rather diverse: he shot Pig (2021) as well as this year’s A Quiet Place: Day One. These were decently shot films, but honestly nothing truly special on that note. When it comes to Sing Sing, however, not only is it evidently by far the best film he has shot, but it should rightly put him in the sights of many talented directors to come.

If Scola doesn’t get nominated for the Best Cinematography, it will be a crime. Granted, there was no doubt a great amount of collaboration between him and this film’s director and co-writer, Greg Kwedar—here offering merely his second feature film, eight years after his debut, a film called Transpecos. (Side note: that film appears to have been fairly critically acclaimed in its own right, and I now wish I had even heard of it, let alone seen it.) But, it was Scola behind the camera, shooting a film set almost entirely, with the exception of the final scene, inside the maximum security prison that is this film’s namesake.

Few people would expect a film set entirely inside a prison to be shot so beautifully, but this becomes clear from the start of the story—and it sets us up for a beautiful story, based on a real theater program, and featuring a whole bunch of former inmates who had been a part of the program. This is the case with a majority of the cast, with the one notable exception of Coleman Domingo, whose own incredibly performance is undiminished by how much the inmate cast shines, especially Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin—who plays himself. Many of this cast plays themselves, in a way never seen in film before, especially so successfully. A few of them play fictionalized characters.

Maclin is incredible. So is Domingo. The rest of the cast is astonishing, considering the behind-the-scenes details. Sean Dino Johnson, who both plays himself and is also a board member for Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), which runs this program, gets a short monologue that is particularly moving.

Sing Sing could have easily been a documentary feature, and one just as memorable and affecting as a narrative film featuring these actors. But this film, as it actually exists, is far more in the spirit of the purpose RTA serves, which the film touches on: it teaches these men how to be vulnerable, how to harness their feelings in healthy ways, how to make it one vital aspect, among many, of their rehabilitation. Most crucially, it showcases these men doing exactly what they learned to do: act. This is an award-worthy ensemble if ever there was one. It’s too bad the Academy Awards do not have a “Best Cast” award—but the SAG Awards do, and they’d better take note.

In this story brilliantly fashioned to showcase all of this talent, John “Divine G” Whitfield (Coleman Domingo) is the unofficial ringleader, delving deep into these productions every season, but now hoping to present compelling evidence of his innocence at an upcoming clemency hearing. In one of the few parts actually played by established actors, the troupe director, Brent, is played by Paul Raci, playing a role similar to the one he played in the also-excellent 2020 film Sound of Metal. Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin plays a version of himself as an inmate who signs up for the program, a man putting on airs as a gangster but with surprising knowledge of Shakespeare, but with significant insecurities once he is accepted.

In the first meeting he attends, Maclin puts forth the proposition that they put on a comedy, because they all have enough tragedy in their actual lives. Whitfield, who has written a script his hopes they will use, is a bit disappointed, but Maclin clearly has a point. Honestly, I mention this mostly because after seeing the bits and pieces of the time traveling comedy play Brent then writes, I really wish I could go see this play in its entirety.

Which is to say: Sing Sing absolutely nails every part of everything it sets out to do, from showcasing talent to telling a perfectly calibrated story that could have been corny or maudlin in lesser hands. At an hour and 45 minutes, even its runtime is perfect, after countless films of recent years, from blockbusters to dramas, becoming reliably overlong. The script, by Greg Bentley and Greg Kwedar—from a story developed by Kwedar and Clint Bentley along with both Maclin and the real “Divine G,” based on the book Break-in’ The Mummy’s Code by Brent Buell (the character played by Paul Raci)—is incredibly tight. It’s a work that could be studied as proof that extra time need not necessarily be taken to tell a profound story with lasting impact. Sometimes it’s limitation that bears perfection.

Sing Sing even gets its meta elements right, standing for both solid storytelling and growth through art at the same time. We see character development and human development at once, in real time. I haven’t even gotten how incredible it is to see an overused monologue from Hamlet performed in a way never seen before, from an unusual performer who delivers the lines with unique conviction and beautifully infusing it with a personality and background Shakespeare himself could never have dreamed of. Sing Sing is a miracle of a movie, gathering the parts of what should be tropes, and instead moving us all forward.

An “Eye” and a “G”: both divine.

Overall: A

DARK WATERS

Directing: B
Acting: A-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

Maybe it’s just because we are currently living in an era with such blatant injustice and corruption, being waved in front of our faces as a constant taunt every day. It just feels like more of an effort to get all riled up about a movie like Dark Waters, and this is a movie about a mega-corporation getting away with knowingly poisoning an entire community. It makes me wonder, would Spotlight have made anywhere near the same impact if it had been released in 2019 instead of 2015? That movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture and stopped just short of $100 million in worldwide grosses. Dark Waters is about just as vital a subject matter, has grossed barely $6.8 million in three weeks, and will almost certainly get no Oscar nominations at all. People are exhausted by being told what they already know: our system is not for the people. No wonder people flock to fantasies like Avengers: Endgame.

When it comes to Dark Waters, though, this leaves me in a bit of a pickle. Should you see it? Oh, definitely, yes. Will it make you feel better about anything at all? Oh, probably not.

This film starts in 1975. A brief scene of a few drunk kids getting caught swimming in a lake they shouldn’t be in, or more reasons than one. There’s a brief shot of a bare skinny dipping butt, so I guess that’s exciting. After a brief moment seeing officials on a boat shooing the kids away and then spraying the surface of the water with something from hoses that is never given any specific explanation, the timeline jumps to 1998 Cincinnati. This is the year the initial case against DuPont begins. By the end of the film we’ve reached 2012, attorney Robert Billott (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Sarah’s (Anne Hathaway) kids are teenagers, and even that’s not the end of it.

In other words, it’s a bit of a slog—and that’s the point. It’s just what DuPont wanted. Still, Dark Waters could have stood at least some tweaks of its editing. At least twice during long tracking shots, I found myself thinking about how the film, which runs at 126 minutes, would have been no worse off without these few minutes. But, cinematographer Edward Lachman (Carol) needs some time to make things look interesting. He actually does a good job, all things considered, but there’s only so much you can do with a movie largely set in law firm meeting rooms. Every once in a while we get a party or a banquet.

Robert does visit the farm in West Virginia where nearly 200 cows have died. The local townspeople as well as this farmer and his wife are presented as no-nonsense and with respect and empathy. The acting across the board is possibly the best thing about this movie. Mark Ruffalo, all scowls and hunches and boxy shoulders and frumpy, is a far cry from the Hulk he plays in the—speak of the Devil—Avengers movies. He disappears into the role. Anne Hathaway’s presence is a little thankless by comparison; perhaps the writers did not see the irony in having her say the line, “Don’t talk to me like I’m the wife.” She’s a stay-at-home mom, and in this movie, “the wife” is all she can be. If Hathaway just wanted to be a part of this because she believed in the overall message of the movie, I can respect that.

That said, while I can’t say I was ever bored watching Dark Waters, it is also lacking in any genuine drama. It’s tedious with a point, and it does feel like necessary information. We’re meant to get a feeling of how much time and effort—literally a decade and a half of it—it took for Robert Billott to make any headway on this case. In the end, there are some positive results. Just not enough to make you stop feeling like DuPont is basically getting away with murder to this day. If nothing else, this movie contextualizes why these days we all avoid Teflon like the plague. A chemical compound used to make it remains in all of our blood streams and won’t ever go away, though. Fun!

I don’t know . . . maybe if you just read this review, that’s enough. DuPont sucks, they literally poisoned all of us, don’t buy . . . whatever they make. This actually is important. The movie is well put together and skillfully acted. Watch it if you feel like maybe you should, and at some point at least, you probably should. Or you could just take another dose of the opiate of the masses and watch another Marvel movie. Just imagine The Hulk turning to the screen and shouting, “Boycot DuPont! HULK SMASH DUPONT!”

This is when Mark Ruffalo turns into Oprah. “YOU get cancer! And YOU get cancer!”

Overall: B