For about 45 minutes, “Rebel Ridge” is an unusually hard, curt race thriller driven by the very real issue of civil forfeiture, in which law enforcement can seize property that it claims to suspect to be involved in a crime without charging the owner. Such a process can obviously foster corruption, and is ample fodder for a volcanic piece of agitprop. Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier seems very up to the promise, at first, until succumbing to the muddled over-plotting that stymied his last film, “Hold the Dark.”
The film’s first 10 or 15 minutes are electric—be warned, as they will get your hopes up for something that doesn’t quite arrive. When a white police officer, Evan Marston (David Denman), pulls over Black Marine Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre)—and by “pull over” I mean the police cruiser is steered deliberately into Terry’s bicycle—we’re instantly aware of the latent physical force of two large and violent-minded men.
Each man is barely holding himself in check: Marston is wrestling with a resentment of a Black stranger, while Terry is balancing the urge to confront this cop with a consideration of the dangerous reality of his situation. Terry, collected yet adamant about his rights and his understanding that Marston is screwing him over, is more confrontational than you expect him to be, which is cathartic as well as suspenseful.
Marston is joined by Officer Steve Lann (Emory Cohen) and they give Terry the “driving while Black” treatment. This man biking through Louisiana countryside was apparently evading arrest. In Terry’s backpack, for the police coerce him into allowing an illegal search, Marston and Lann find a large amount of money that we’ll learn is intended to bail a cousin out of prison. The plot matters less than the finely coiled tension of the scene, rendered in long takes that allow the emotions to slowly reach a boiling point.
Marston and Lann aren’t drawn as broadly as one might expect. You get the sense that they don’t see themselves as villains, a rudimentary form of empathy that many modern civic-minded films don’t manage. Marston and Lann’s ability to describe wild overreaches of the law with calm “just doing my job” matter-of-factness is haunting. The cartoon racists of “Get Out” and “Master,” among many others, let us off the hook to an extent, allowing us to distance ourselves from their actions.
Saulnier is himself white, best known for thrillers like “Blue Ruin” and “Green Room,” and the notion of a white guy building a genre film around a Black protagonist who is driven to take revenge against the mostly white police force of a sleepy Southern town is nervy kind of authorial projection. There is a sense in this film of fire being played with, and for a while Saulnier keeps pushing social pressure points.
Another cop, Officer Sims (Zsane Jhe) is a Black woman, whom Terry briefly takes hostage, and whom Saulnier shows navigating the racism of the locals while fearing for her life at Terry’s hands while siding with her employers while empathizing with Terry for pushing back against institutionally sanctioned atrocity. That’s the only scene in “Rebel Ridge” that can compete with its fabulous opening, and it’s a head-spinner, especially for a media that seems to think that people can be comfortably filed into reductive and mutually exclusive slots, whether we’re talking race, gender, class, etc.
“Rebel Ridge” initially suggests a race-driven spin on “First Blood” or a Jack Reacher novel, with Terry using his intelligence and super-competency to uncover a criminal network. Pierre is superb, and his role isn’t straitjacketed as a martyr: he gets to be funny and powerful and badass. He has a great scene when his eyes light up with malevolent pleasure as Terry reveals to the big bad how he’s outfoxed him. That bad is played by Don Johnson, who reminds us yet again that he is a canny character actor. This role is essentially a reprise of the racist cop that Johnson played for S. Craig Zahler in “Dragged Across Concrete,” and Johnson remains a master in hostility that’s insidiously cloaked in winding, drawling, good-‘ol-boy smoothness.
If you’re looking for the “but” here, it’s the second half of “Rebel Ridge,” which is cluttered and impersonal in the tradition of too many modern thrillers to count. Saulnier seems to lose track of the emotions driving the piece, thorny emotions connected to America’s legacy of racism and governmental overreach, and he gets stranded spelling out a conspiracy that’s discernible the moment it’s referenced.
Running 132 minutes, this film is overlong by at least 30, and here I will repeat myself: What is it with modern filmmakers and their insatiable obsession with movies that run at least two-and-a-quarter hours? Is it that old matter of artists not wanting to kill their darlings? Is it connected to the assumption that we stream most everything now and that, already beached on our couch for the night, we won’t care? “Rebel Ridge” yearns to be lean and mean and hard, and Saulnier mires it down in a repetitive game of tag between Terry and the bad cops that grows interminable.
The plot is so convoluted that Terry’s vengeance seems to arrive as an afterthought. And a late-inning plot twist is unforgivable, redeeming a character in a manner that trivializes the film’s larger sociopolitical concerns.
On paper, Lee Daniels’ “The Deliverance” sounds like merely this week’s exorcism drama. But it’s also a racial parable that’s even more provocative than “Rebel Ridge.” Daniels, the melo-dramatist behind “Precious” and “The Paperboy”, among others, isn’t a filmmaker for timid measures. He likes wild oscillations in tone and mood and bold, blunt scenes that beg the audience to take the enterprise or leave it. When filmmakers have that kind of moxie, I tend to admire them despite or perhaps because of the sloppiness that comes with maintaining such close contact with your id.
The provocation at the center of “The Deliverance” is that it’s a supernaturally-themed drama about a Black family that for some reason has Glenn Close at the center of it, turned up to 12. Close plays Alberta, mother of Ebony (Andra Day), who is herself mother of Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins), Nate (Caleb McLaughlin), and Shante (Demi Singleton). It’s 2011 and Ebony’s husband is in Iraq, while the family moves into a cramped and creepy house and struggles with money issues, social workers, and Ebony’s alcoholism. The heart of the movie is the tug-of-war between Alberta and Ebony, who call each other bitch and take turns throwing their respective pasts in their faces.
These standoffs have an edgy, vulgar power—they work because they are tasteless, refuting the drab timidity of most modern “issues” movies. An obvious source of resentment for Ebony, unspoken until late in the film, is how at home the very-white Alberta feels among Black people. Alberta is so flagrant and high on herself that she hits on a younger nurse (Omar Epps) while receiving treatment for cancer. Older Black ladies nearby comment on Alberta’s brazenness and she tells them to go to hell, too.
The cancer and Alberta’s alcoholic past—from which she is in recovery by doubling down on God—give her indulgences a foundation. This is a woman who is going to do what she wants, and she’s so free from self-consciousness that she’ll even trade barbs with the formidable Mo’Nique without batting an eye. Close and Daniels are just as brazen. If they had flinched once, this enterprise would fall apart. What they are getting at here is how families in real life have divisions and bonds that transcend media pieties. That scene with Officer Sims in “Rebel Ridge” has a similar point.
This is an unusually rich foundation for a horror movie, then, though Daniels doesn’t have much interest in the horror stuff, which turns out to be old-hat. It’s a shame that the tropes—flies, glowing eyes, backwards-crawling children—haven’t been updated here. But the demon is resonant as a symbol of Ebony’s self-loathing, and Daniels doesn’t shy away from the spiritual dimensions of her agony. Imagine if William Peter Blatty had co-written “The Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous. In theory, that doesn’t sound particularly appetizing, but Daniels damn near makes it work.
“Rebel Ridge” and “The Deliverance” are both available on Netflix.
