Steve McQueen's SMALL AXE (2020)

 Collected reviews of all 5 films):

1) Lover's Rock

What do you do when you can dance and sing and play like no one is watching? What happens when you can just be with everyone in a room gproving and grinding and feeling free to music? Or for that matter being free? (I know Josh Larsen of Filmspotting already made this observation, but hey, I can make it as well). 

What I love so much about Steve McQueen as a communicator as much as an artist is that, while he can tell a good story, he is most concerned with expressing through his camera and the people he casts and how long he keeps on a shot a feeling, and many times it's a sustained mood and expression of pathos. You have the tension of a very long conversation like the 16 minute shot in Hunger, or when we see Michael Fassbender is in agonizing sexual pain on his face after having sex for hours on end, or keeping on that torturous display of Solomon hanging and barely being kept alive while people go on with their business. But rarely have we seen McQueen show total joy and peace, yet it's something he shows he knows how to present and then some in Lover's Rock as everyone sways to the steady love anthem "Silly Games" and then breaks out into singing it for what feels like ten minutes (maybe shorter, could've gone on longer).

I can't be the only one who broke out in tears during the scene, no? Maybe it's seeing this following such a wretched many months to a year where (having common sense) being able to have this kind of intense connective experience is impossible. Or it is simply that McQueen understands and knows how to depict that wave of rapture that can take over people, and this goes beyond race though it is absolutely a filmmaker representing a people who rarely get to see this on screen, and that it can be overwhelming for the senses. I often find as I get older I tear up more at seeing pure, unadulterated kindness, and this is like that: everyone, for this night and with these DJs and this groove, can be OK and in love with one another and have that special emotion one gets when singing along to a song.  I'll even get more high and mighty: It's... A cinematic moment that is good for the soul.

This doesn't mean Lovers Rock isn't, or isn't just, about seeing people dance in a room, though McQueen does eschew traditional A-B-C storytelling to give us two young women who go to this house party and things just... Happen, good and bad. There is politics to this as well, sexual politics, how a man will mistreat a woman and how women stand up for their fellow woman or a man might for a woman and that intense, eons-deep reaction where two men in the thick of it butt heads (there isn't violence like fists thrown, but it comes close to that, an emotional violence simmering). And at one point when an altercation by a front door seems about to happen, and a cop car rolls by and so one man practically throws the other into the house to tell him to shut the F up, that feeling McQueen has been showing us is revealed to be kind of tenuous; there is freedom, but it could all crumble with one dumb or even accidental moment.

Lovers Rock doesn't reveal its greatness all at once, and at first you may wonder what is the point of showing us a long, Cannabis-fueled party... But by "Silly Games" it's clear this is a mini master's class in how cinema can be raw, sensual, vibrant and cool, or how it should be that from time to time.

2) Mangrove (fyi I know on Amazon Mangrove comes first, but I flipped the order)

The Other Notting Hill

Do you think somewhere at some time Aaron Sorkin will watch this and think "Hmm... Maybe I didn't get it right with the Chicago Seven..." Eh? I can dream, can't I? 

This is very good and potent and fiery drama for the first 40-50 minutes. Then once it gets to the courtroom, McQueen and company go into what it's really about and always been about for Black and Brown people not just in Britain but all over the world: injustice stems from total ignorance and the ill-educated (that damn Constable who will stay where he's at because he can't rise through the ranks), and then settles among the so-called educated like judges and prosecutors and seemingly all well-and-good members of a (mixed, mostly White, thank you) Jury.

And just because it's another courtroom drama doesn't mean it isnt great or compelling because McQueen makes sure each image has dramatic power and a purpose (watch how he moves around that big head of hair of the one woman growing increasingly restless and rightly pissed, and we know something is about to happen). He directs this story with conviction and a great control of pacing, and his cast is pitch perfect. 

Every city in the West has a PC Pulley, and most towns. It asks tough and just questions about what not even so much what these characters are doing but implicitly what we would or might do if we were there. This is all to say Mangrove makes a piece of history human, intense and as cinema tactile and harrowing (watch as everyone waits for the verdict, on the page there probably wasn't a lot there, but it's made into a whole life put into the balance in those few minutes).

And yeah, get rid of the pigs.

3) Red, White and Blue 

"I want to join the force."
"What, are you gonna be a Jedi or something?"

.... Congrats, movie, you just got one star deducted on principle! 

Seriously, this is actually most effective experiencing right after Mangrove as it's thematically linked; not all but I assume some finish watching that film and ask "well, can the cops be nothing but a bunch of villainous ignorant wankers? (or more fiercely, ACAB?) What Red, White and Blue means to show may be obvious to some, certainly those of us who lived in the Obama years and saw first hand: trying to get in on the inside to "change" things doesn't work with the snap of a finger, or at all, and when stacked up against either racist slobs or, worse, the cowards who know better and sit back say nothing when clear wrongs are apparent it's enough to say there's just a decency chip in someone's brain that has to be comoarmentalized at best and done away with at worst to be a police officer. 

Boyega as Leroy is subtle and also electrifying, often in what he doesn't say and then how the character blows up when pushed too far, and how immediately expressive his eyes are and his body language can be (I'm reminded of some of his key scenes in Detroit, one in particular in an interrogation that made the movie memorable in no small part). It's funny now as I finish it to think about that Jedi line since this is the reverse of his arc in the Star War he was in (Finn leaving his trooper regiment to do the "right" thing, here he's trying to change within and without any luck). But also major kudos to Steve Toussaint as Leroy's father, who kicks off Leroy's unlikely dive into his change in profession. 

The moment when he gets so mad at Leroy when finding out what he's going to do works as conventionally (though well done) melodrama, but watch as he reacts with uncertainty and this "What the Hell is my Dignity now" when he's told the court decision for his case. And wow bob wow does McQueen get a dynamic, emotionally intricate composition from the dad in that bathroom (and how Leroy pops in and then leaves, but McQueen stays on him). 

It would be easy for McQueen to just make this a "F*** All the Police" screed, or even for us to read into that, and to his credit it doesn't feel as pat as that. We have the cartoonish racist creep, but what's more striking is how Red White and Blue shows everyone else around Leroy, including those officers who use him as a recruitment tool early on and immediately it makes him a marked man in the department - in the whole neighborhood. I don't think the filmmakers mean to show that everyone at that station is an intentional horrible asshole, rather that most of them don't want to rock the boat either way. At its best, this feels like Serpico as far as examining morality and the degradation of the human spirit, only instead of it being a cop who doesn't take stolen money, he's... Black. And by the end, nothing is resolved except he's... Trapped in the design of his own making.

4) Alex Wheatle

"Education is the most important thing!"

Now there's a line I can get behind! And the rest of the film is... Good. Sometimes, mayne several times, brilliant and cinematically transcendent. 

Alex Wheatle, about an author who my dumb American butt hasnt heard of, has as its main mark against it that, in its way, director McQueen is working here with the biopic formula. He absolutely finds paths to creating Wheatle's story and, really, the story of the world he was growing up all too fast in in Brixton in creative and even poetic styles (a key moment when the narrative breaks off for five minutes to a series of photographs from the Bruxton uprising and protests from the early 1980s as a poem is being read that encompasses so much about a people in so little time), and there is one particular shot, you'll know the one, when young Alex gets into a fight with a stupid white shit in his class and is put onto a straight-jacket, that is classic McQueen in its sustained horror at the human condition. 

I like the performer a lot as well, and there are some stand-out quieter moments, like when he is in bed smoking a joint and comes up with a song of rebellion and it's the kind of moment in movies where we get to see how someone creates and it doesn't feel cheap or idiotic, on the contrary it comes off like an organic dramatization. 

I wish there was more of that at points, and a problem for me was the framing device of Alex in jail getting his Life Lessons(TM) from a Larger than Life Rastafarian. There may well have been a cat like that who Alex met, but on film it isn't very interesting; Malcolm X has practically the same dramatic story point, yet that film made that pivotal while Alex's fellow prisoner comes across like a ploy gimmick (and there's only so much time to tell his story here any way).

All this said, the direction is still magnificent throughout, with as much care put to the hand-held as the locked-down shots, and if the pacing is chopper due to the story bouncing more from this way and that it makes its mark because when it does slow down the usual bio-pic tropes have conviction and dramatic heft. Even when McQueen has to get conventional, his approach doesn't feel like it, if that makes any kind of sense.

And last but not least: 

5) Education

The key to why Education is moving and goes deep into the core of what makes people get a leg up in life is that the Mother is just as important to the story as Kingsley. Matter of fact, though he seems to have more of the screen time at least in the first half, Mom has the arc and goes through her own education, and yet as misguided as she is early on there is sympathy. One (or at least I) may sense she dudnt grow up with things many of us (at least in the West) take for granted; late in the film, she finally in an act of possible desperation pulls out a book and tells Kingsley to read, and he bursts into tears because he... Cant get there. 

Did she ever sit down to read to or with Kingsley when he was very little? Did she have the time as a constantly working mother? Dad wasn't going to do it (if there is a flaw it's that he is too one note, all he says is "come work with me and learn a trade," and sure, he doesn't know better either, but to a fault). This is me reading in-between the lines, and that's to McQueen's credit: the way he directs this and uses what I assume is grainy 16mm cinematography to be more intimate and closer to the subjects (this and Lover's Rock, the two Small Axes not based off true cases or people, look the most unique and charged with the pulse of light) and casts it so it feels immediate and raw and like we are immersed into this story. This is significant because a lessor filmmaker could take this same script and make it like an After-School Special. It's a "Message" at its core that is even more clearly stated than the other films in this anthology, but that's not an inherently wrong thing... If you're just honest about it. 

What stuns me is that by the time we get to that "I can't read" breakdown (and sorry but I just have Mike Myers as Waybe Campbell crying and exclaiming he never leatned to read), it's beyond earned. The emotional work of a mother and son is powerful, thoughtful and the performers have the benefit of being faces (I assume) most of us haven't seen before. Is this McQueen doing Ken Loach? Maybe. 

At the same time it's very much this artist throughout - the stand-out being a display of controlled, almost hazy cringe if that can be a thing where the kids in this "Special" school have to sit with this Bum (yes I mean that in the British way) awkwardly playing a guitar and doing his worst "House of the Rising Sun" and McQueen and the DP wander from bored to occasional wide-eyed face (what is the barking girl gonna do), and it displays one of the director's gifts of bending and sculpting time in a way where we feel it. 

Putting aside the setting and the representation of people, it's a great gift to master, and Small Axe, which on the whole is only disappointing in that it isn't *quite* the high of what this most reminds me of in ambition and scope, Kieslowski's Dekalog (and I mean talk about problems we'd all love to have), is the work of an artist who understands how to challenge himself and challenge us to go for these highly political and deeply human sagas.