News Reporter: Act Four: ‘Detroit’ isn’t a good movie. But I want you to see it so we can talk about it.

Friday, 4 August 2017

Act Four: ‘Detroit’ isn’t a good movie. But I want you to see it so we can talk about it.

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

John Boyega in a scene from "Detroit." (Francois Duhamel/Annapurna Pictures via Associated Press)

I’m not going to be able to write about Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s “Detroit” until next week, both because I’ve been preoccupied with the end stages of a year-long project and because I haven’t quite been able to wrestle my feelings about the movie to the ground yet. There are some advantages to writing this way: More of you will have seen the movie by Monday or Tuesday than will have seen it today, and so we’ll be able to really talk about it with each other.

But because I know a lot of you are wondering about “Detroit” now, I wanted to round up some of the criticism of it that I’ve been reading, simply to seed the conversation.

I don’t know that I fully agree with Angelica Jade Bastien’s review of “Detroit” for RogerEbert.com — in fact, because it’s about a highly personal reaction to the movie, I can’t inhabit her feelings about the movie — but I appreciated her perspective.

Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham discussed the movie in the context of HBO’s planned series “Confederate,” Dana Schutz’s “Open Casket” and the larger question of white depictions of black suffering. As part of their conversation, Morris asked a question that I think is worth keeping in mind: “Are we talking about the quality of a painting? Are we even allowed to talk about the quality of a painting or the quality of ‘Detroit’? Or if — if God forbid ‘Confederate’ is good — what do we do with that? Can it even be good at this point? … And what would good even mean?”

A.O. Scott’s review makes an interesting observation about cruelty as a cinematic subject. He writes “The Algiers [motel, where the central event in the film takes place] becomes a trap, not only for the characters, who are stuck inside at the mercy of a maniac, but for the film itself, which loses its political and psychological coherence as the night drags on.”

“Detroit” falls into an odd, small category of films. I don’t think it’s a good movie, but I think the conversations that emerge from it could be. I know a critic is supposed to warn you off bad movies. But in this case, I hope you see it, if only so we can talk about it.

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