The Hurricane
The Trenton Redemption
All things being equal, my favorite line from the movies of the 1990’s is probably still from Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. The incomparable Samuel L. Jackson is in the office of bail bondsman Robert Forster, and Jackson is trying to intimidate his way out of paying money owed. “Is white liberal guilt,” Foster glowers, “supposed to make me forget that I’m running a business?” Jackson flinches; probably that sector of the audience afflicted with white liberal guilt did too.
I flinched a little when I saw the previews and reviews of The Hurricane. On the surface, The Hurricane is little more than a direct appeal to the bleeding hearts of the guilty white liberals in the audience. It is the story of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (Denzel Washington), a contender for the middleweight boxing crown who was convicted of a crime he did not commit by an all-white jury, aided by racist cops and prosecutors. Carter was sentenced to life in prison, where he briefly became a liberal cause celebre and a subject of a song by Bob “Minnesota Mud Throat” Dylan. (Dylan appears in a brief film clip, looking absolutely ridiculous.) Carter was eventually cleared after twenty years in prison, and now is a fixture of the movement to oppose capital punishment.
I was skeptical of The Hurricane, as you might imagine, and even more skeptical after press stories which pointed out fictions and exaggerations in the script. However, I finally convinced myself to go, primarily on the strength of Denzel Washington’s Oscar nomination. I gritted my teeth, preparing for the onslaught of wave after wave of white liberal guilt crashing on the ironbound coastline of my consciousness with the powerful force of… er… a mixed metaphor or something.
I was totally unprepared for what I saw: a good, if not great, movie about core traditional conservative values like faith and courage and redemption and the healing power of hope and love.
The Hurricane starts off rather slowly, naturally enough, with a great deal of exposition designed to convince the audience that Hurricane Carter is innocent, combined with a fine eye for period details by the set designer. We see quite a bit of details from Carter’s early life, enough to let us know that the cards in the deck of the criminal justice system are stacked against Carter and that Detective Della Pesca (the reliably sleazy Dan Hedaya) is dealing from the bottom of the deck. We see Carter’s relationship with his wife and his feelings about the civil rights movement. We see Carter losing a chance at the middleweight crown in the ring through hometown bias.
And we see some savage murders in a New Jersey nightclub (one is reminded, somehow, of the Night Owl murders in L.A. Confidential). Carter and a friend are picked up by the police, identified (sort of) by a witness or two, and sentenced to life in prison. Carter, protesting his innocence all the way, is almost immediately thrown into “the hole” (what’s called “administrative segregation” these days).
Carter’s placement in “the hole” triggers a scene that’s astonishingly good, though a bit overlong. It’s a scene that sets the stage for Carter’s redemption and ultimate vindication, and more than that I will not say. I will say that while Carter’s redemption in Trenton State Prison doesn’t quite approach that in The Shawshank Redemption or Cool Hand Luke or many another great prison movie, it is in that tradition and in that league. (By the way, Clancy Brown, who played a sadistic prison guard in Shawshank, shows up in The Hurricane as a sympathetic guard.)
Washington is superb as Hurricane Carter, and proves once again that he deserves better from Hollywood. Carter is a difficult, if not impossible, task for any actor, but Washington conveys Carter’s changing moods and changing fortunes skillfully. The audience is convinced of Carter’s innocence because Washington is convinced; buys into Carter’s spiritual redemption because Washington makes us believe. After a string of forgettable parts as cops in forgettable movies (Fallen, The Siege, The Bone Collector), Washington turns in a stellar performance, worthy of the Oscar nomination he earned.
Interspersed with the tale of Rubin Carter is the tale of Lesra Martin. Martin, a young man from Brooklyn living with three foster parents in Toronto, buys Carter’s book The Sixteenth Round at a library sale and cannot put it down. Swept up in the power of Carter’s words, Lesra convinces his Canadian friends to travel with him to Trenton to meet Carter, and eventually they work together for his release.
Most of the last part of The Hurricane focuses on the Canadians (John Hannah, Liev Schrieber, and the underrated Deborah Unger) and their efforts to get Carter released. However, for me at least, the proper focus of The Hurricane is not when or how Carter will be released; we know he will be. The question is; what sort of man will Carter be when he is released? That story, if you will, is the eye of The Hurricane, and the calm center of the movie is worth waiting through the swirling torrents of white liberal guilt that surround the movie.