American Skin 2019

American Skin is an emotionally captivating movie. There's a lot of things it does right. The acting is excellent. Every character has a role and they hit their notes pretty hard. There was enough character developed to understand why the kid reacted as he did and then enough to feel emotional when he's shot.

It scales up perfectly with the tension when the officer gets no sufficient evidence at the indictment hearing. It may be common knowledge now with the rise of public reporting of this incidents but there's a difference between the indictment hearing and an actual trial. I wish the movie had had time to kinda go into that. The anger isn't that the officer was found innocent. It was that they refused to have a trial. The refusal to even show evidence and hear the case is one of the most frustrating aspects of these well known officer killings.

The next phase of the movie is the take over of the precinct. This is one of the shakier moments. It's mostly handwaved and suddenly the police as taken hostage and the military black people are in charge. In a better or different movie we'd have a better look at HOW they lock down a precinct. I think they did it better in John Q and in The Negotiator. But the energy is good and you can let yourself get swept away in the tension. The last and final phase of the movie however deflates all that well developed tension. It lasts for a while as the trial is setup but at a certain point "everyone" gets allowed a say and while it sends an interesting message to suggest that the jurors and supporters be allowed to speak it does devolve the trial from a situation of tension into a debate. And the movie feels like more of a hypothetical dialogue than an interaction of characters. There are good points and points so stupid only a moron would make them and yet as we've seen in the past years people DO make them. I like the debate-trial but it's hard to care about it because without that tension it's just people talking back and forth yelling at each other. Sometimes the points being made while "realistic" don't match the tone of the immediate scene. This is most prevalent in the most important part of the trial (Major yet unsurprising Spoiler) when the defendant officer admits that he only pulled the car over because it was a beat up car with black people in a rich white neighborhood. It's a great scene and it's not unearned, but it's not earned THEN at that exact moment. It's like watching a police procedural when the accused person spontaneously confesses to the crime for no reason.

Like the best Spike Lee joints the movie concludes with the exposition of news footage. News footage that paints an offensively casually racist portrayal of what happened. This time it made me think of Stockholm where people twisted what happened there they create an entire medical syndrome to explain away anything that the women had to say about why they warmed up to the bank robbers and didn't trust the police. A portrayal that persists so hard to this day it's a literal trope of movies and people insist this is a thing that happens.

I had a good time with this movie but it got sloppy at the best part focusing so much on the dialog it neglected any other aspect of the world around it.