Night Catches Us: A criminally overlooked film about the legacy of the
Black Power movement. - By Elbert Ventura
One of the more promising debuts in recent American cinema, Tanya
Hamilton's Night Catches Us barely made a noise with critics when it
came out last fall. Considering how parched we are for expressions of
the variousness of the black experience, the neglect was unfortunate.
The movie, out on DVD this week, covers terrain rarely touched by the
culture: the long hangover from the ecstatic peak of Black Power
militancy. With a subject as sexy as the Panthers, a filmmaker could
easily drift into histrionic and stylistic indulgence. But Hamilton
displays cool and finely modulated control. Hers is a patient film about
deflated hopes, a period piece that inadvertently captures the vibe of
the present.
The film is set in Philadelphia in 1976. Marcus Washington (Anthony
Mackie) returns to the family home for his father's funeral after years
in exile. But the former Panther receives a frosty welcome. We learn
that he left town years earlier under a cloud, bearing an ignominious
label from his comrades: snitch. Even as he tries to keep a low profile,
the remnants of the organization, led by DoRight (Jamie Hector, aka
Marlo from The Wire), circle him warily. The only one happy to see him
is Patricia (Kerry Washington), also a Panther in her younger days and
now a lawyer and upstanding member of the establishment.
A living emblem of how fervid radicalism gets smoothed into liberal
reformism, Patricia retains her ideals amid a crumbling city. The
Panthers have become little more than a disorganized clique trafficking
in criminality and the occasional unproductive swat at the cops. Working
within the system, Patricia has found a semblance of purpose in her new
role as respected community leader. But the past weighs heavily. Her
10-year-old daughter, Iris (Jamara Griffin), has begun to ask
questions—particularly about her absent father. He never once appears in
the movie, but the former Panther's presence haunts its frames. It's
eventually revealed that the cops gunned him down in Patricia's living
room—echoes of Fred Hampton—while Iris was still a baby. And many in the
party think they know who informed on him: Marcus.
Night Catches Us isn't so much concerned with radicalism as its
aftershocks. Among the most mythologized—and most feared—of '60s rebels,
the Black Panthers have been preserved in the collective memory via
images that are largely sensational, veering between idolatry and
demonization: gun-toting black men in green berets, radical chic
personified or, later, a movement plunged into chaos, the exemplar of a
leftism that careered into lawlessness. Even now, the image of menacing
Panthers bullying helpless whites haunts conservative dreams: Witness
the Fox News obsession with the New Black Panther Party's alleged
campaign of voter intimidation, which amounts to little more than the
deplorable acts of two party members outside a Philadelphia polling
place. (It's worth noting that the New Black Panther Party, an entirely
unsavory outfit, has nothing to do with the original Panthers, as those
Panthers have taken pains to point out.)
Hamilton deploys those remembered images of Panthers past cannily,
wallpapering her movie with slick iconography from the halcyon days. The
relics of the period—archival footage, posters, comic books—don't just
bring back the past but serve as talismans for a new generation seeking
purpose. When Patricia's young cousin, Jimmy (Amari Cheatom), looks at
the paraphernalia, his eyes light up. Here are the Panthers as the
radicals in the universities and the oppressed in the inner cities saw
them—in the words of Todd Gitlin, "James Dean and Frantz Fanon rolled
into one."
But Hamilton is more interested in interrogation than idolatry. She
summons those glamorous images (including some posters by the Panthers'
Minister of Culture Emory Douglas) to juxtapose them with the messier
reality of the left. "To me, the Panthers have not been allowed to be
humanized," Hamilton has said. "We didn't want the movie to be about
sexy black men with guns." As if to underscore the distance traveled
from those days of rage, Hamilton depicts a world of familiar
domesticity. Her characters move through cluttered kitchens, inviting
porches, homey living rooms. The occasional gunshot and crime may
violate the setting, but the will to preserve family and community is
still strong. It is a portrait of a neighborhood clinging valiantly to
its dignity amid white flight, unemployment, and incarceration.
(Continued from page 1)
But how to preserve that dignity is a matter of dispute. Night Catches
Us tackles the contested legacy of Black Power. When Patricia talks to
Iris about her Panther past—and the cop-killing her father was involved
in—she stresses mournfully, "That's not who we were." She represents the
Panthers of the free breakfast programs and health centers, activists
drawn to the community-organizing potential of the movement. DoRight
stands in for the militant wing, the part of the movement where activism
gave way to thuggishness. It is that legacy, as much pose as outlook,
that sets young Jimmy's tragic course:
Even as she rubs the romantic sheen off resistance, Hamilton never lets
you forget that the reasons for it have not disappeared. The reality of
urban black life—shuttered stores, dilapidated factories, aggressive
police—is rendered unsparingly. If Spike Lee urged his audience to do
the right thing, Hamilton's message is more ambiguous: There may not be
much we can do. That's the reality that confronts Marcus: a black man
constricted by his environment but exhausted by revolution, the impulse
toward change overwhelmed by the need to just walk away from the whole
mess.
The last few years have brought a succession of novels that interrogate
the '60s left and the fallout from its failures: Dana Spiotta's Eat the
Document, Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions, Peter Carey's His Illegal Self.
And the movies have given us the culture's iconic '60s burnout. Lest we
forget, the Coen brothers' greatest creation, the Dude, is also their
most political: One of the authors of the original Port Huron Statement
("not the compromised second draft") and a member of the Seattle Seven
("there were six others"), adrift in Bush père's New World Order. Night
Catches Us fills a glaring gap, limning an experience—that of the rueful
black ex-radical—conspicuously missing from the national narrative.
But it's not so much her subject but her sensibility that makes Hamilton
someone to watch. Hardly lacking in style—no movie with a kick-ass Roots
soundtrack can be accused of that—Night Catches Us opts for a softer
register. Hamilton directs Mackie and Washington to turn the volume
down. They move slowly, talk quietly, the hangover from the '60s made
literal by their mien. It's smart casting—we may not get the details of
Marcus and Patricia's former radicalism, but their movie-star looks
serve as a reminder of their outlaw-glam past.
Set in the summer of the bicentennial, Night Catches Us evokes a country
in decline. The death of Marcus' father doesn't just initiate the
proceedings—it's a metaphor for the fading away of an entire generation.
Hamilton depicts a black community in upheaval, the older folks passing
on, the '60s generation dispersing, and a new cohort of black youth
learning the wrong lessons from the past. Marcus and Patricia's
respective fates—the black man disaffected and on the move, the black
woman digging in her heels to raise a family and prop up a
community—serve as allegories for the trajectory of black America in the
decades since the Great Society. On the horizon for Patricia and Marcus
is Carter. Reagan comes next. The sense of resignation that shrouds
Night Catches Us is anticipatory: Their America won't be seeing morning
for a while.
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