Safe to say that the most
towering achievement in filmmaking this year is Steve McQueen’s highly-personal
“Small Axe” series of five films, now appearing on Amazon Prime,
about the experience of West Indian immigrants to the UK
Mangrove (MC-90), like Stonewall, refers to both a place and a
movement: a small Trinidadian restaurant
in Notting Hill, and the uprising of a marginalized community in response to
police brutality. After a loud but
peaceful protest against official harassment, which turned violent when the
police attacked, the Mangrove Nine were charged with “riot and affray.” The first half of the movie follows the
restaurant becoming a community center, and attracting the attention of some
racist cops (pardon me, bobbies), and the second half is taken up with the Old
Bailey trial of the protestors, reminiscent of, but an interesting contrast to,
the contemporaneous Trial of the Chicago 7.
Lovers Rock (MC-95) takes a totally different tack, portraying one
night’s house party in the 1980s era of the eponymous musical genre, which
bridged reggae with Motown and foretastes of hip-hop. Not welcome in British pubs and clubs, new
immigrants from the Caribbean mingle with the children of an earlier generation to
celebrate their distinctive sound and the mixing culture it evokes, both
sensuous and rocking. The film puts you
right in the middle of the dance floor, participating in the ecstasy and the
passion for 70 intense minutes. Also on
Prime is the documentary The Story of Lovers Rock, which fills in a lot
of background and context, especially on the Janet Kay song “Silly Games,”
which features so prominently in the McQueen film. After the doc, I watched the party film
again, with another whole level of appreciation. It’s a profound revelation as well as a
visceral experience.
The next two films in the
series depict the contrasting life arcs of two real individuals. Red, White & Blue (MC-84) follows
Leroy Logan (powerfully portrayed by John Boyega) as he leaves behind a career
as a forensic scientist to enter law enforcement, on an unlikely quest to
reform institutional racism from within.
In counterpoint, his father determinedly pursues his day in court after
being beaten by a pair of bigoted cops on a bogus parking violation. Two strong Black men who can’t see eye to eye
despite their deep bond. Only when
seeing the character’s name listed as a consultant in the closing credits did I
realize that this was the true story of a real-life superhero.
Similarly, it was only after
watching Alex Wheatle (MC-77) that I learned that the title
character would become the prize-winning author of numerous YA novels, even an
MBE. An outcome hard to imagine after
the dire story of his beginnings in foster “care.” His story intersects with other Small Axe
films when at 16 he’s a founding member of a “sound system” like that in Lovers
Rock, and at 18 he’s incarcerated for participation in the Brixton riots of
1981. This is the slightest film of the
series, but still packs a punch.
Education (MC-88) is short as well, and a bit more didactic, but
also rings with an implicit autobiographical authenticity, about a preteen boy
who is bright but dyslexic. As a West
Indian, he is shunted aside into a school for the “educationally subnormal,”
which is just a dumping ground. But his
sorely overworked mother takes up his cause and becomes an activist, for a
group providing supplementary schooling for those underserved by the
government, something McQueen himself benefited from. So this concludes a cycle of films about
institutional racism with an affirmation that a small axe can chip away at a
big tree, and hope to take it down.
Each film works in its own
right, but collectively they become a masterwork. [Closed captioning strongly recommended for
all of them, since the patois is hard to penetrate.]
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