Blu-ray Review: Bill Duke’s Neo-Noir Deep Cover on the Criterion Collection

Criterion’s lush transfer makes it clear now, more than ever, that Deep Cover is one of the great American thrillers of the early ’90s.

Deep CoverBill Duke’s 1992 film Deep Cover has a deeply ironic premise, in which a black man is ordered by a white-driven government to assume a life that he has worked strenuously to escape. Russell Stevens Jr. (Laurence Fishburne) is an up-and-coming police officer in Cincinnati who’s summoned by a C.I.A. operative, Carver (Charles Martin Smith), who asks him a question that cuts to the neuroses driving the film: “Tell me, do you know the difference between a black man and a nigger?” This question has ruffled several other officers, but Russell, unfazed, says that “the nigger is the one who would even answer that question.” Carver is impressed, as the response, coupled with Russell’s subsequent actions, suggests a paradox: a controllable autonomy on Russell’s part, as he resents the corrupt and racist authority that he nevertheless seeks to impress. Which is to say that he’s a perfect cog in America’s endless war on drugs.

This dialogue, probably more scandalous for audiences now than in 1992, is a deliberate shock to the system—a way of clearing the air and exposing the resentments and contradictions driving the characters and America at large. Carver, a white man in power who sees others as means to an end, not only dares to ask such a question but to presume to know the “correct” answer, which Russell takes in embittered stride. It’s clear that Russell is used to messing with people like this, and his defenses are manifest, yet he still follows orders. This tension is always palpable in Fishburne’s extraordinary performance, in which he plays a “straight man” role with a kind of tortured, self-compensating swagger that’s still sensual as hell.

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Deep Cover isn’t the sort of skittish, self-congratulatory civics lesson on racism that’s released and obligatorily applauded on an almost monthly basis nowadays. It’s raw and blunt and operatically poetic, leaving scars and raising queasy questions about our casual complicity in our own and others’ oppression. Michael Tolkin and Henry Bean’s screenplay is loaded with obscenities, with the question that Carver asks Russell at the start of the film serving as a kind of riddle and thesis statement. Everyone in Deep Cover attempts to transcend, and empower, their cultural identity with money and social ascension, embodying how society intensifies our insecurities while offering capitalism as an all-purpose cure of the same.

America’s ridiculous, disastrous, hypocritical war on drugs epitomizes money as the country’s true god, and Russell gets a crash course in this idea when Carver recruits him to go to Los Angeles and live as a drug dealer. The ostensible intention is to indict powerful members of a Latin American cartel, and Russell, who as a child saw his father die high as a kite while trying to rob a liquor store, is to become what he loathes. Or, at least, thinks he loathes.

As Russell rises in the organization, he gets addicted to the power. But Duke, Tolkin, and Bean are too keen of artists to judge this development. They know that few wouldn’t groove to the new clothes, cars, sexual validity, and all-around ability to do whatever they want. And the drugs, which are so valuable precisely because they’re outlawed by a government that continually changes its rules on said drug warfare, are going to be sold either way.

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As Russell says to the audience via voiceover, which has the despairing, disassociated, piped-in-from-the-halls-of–the-damned quality of the voiceover in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the traits that made him such a good cop—including his resentment of authority—serve him in the drug trade, a link that epitomizes how law enforcement and criminals are basically playing assigned roles in the war on drugs, with loyalties shifting arbitrarily according to political alliances. Russell pollutes his soul and nearly loses himself for a mission that’s unceremoniously changed midstream for drug dealers with government capital. Controversies such as the Iran-Contra Affair, and the reveal that the C.I.A. flooded crack into the U.S. to fund the contras in Nicaragua, haunt Deep Cover, which follows a protagonist who tries to remain in some fashion honorable while playing a rigged game.

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Deep Cover is richly textured, electric, and viciously funny. Despite its myriad resonances and tragic echoes of current events, the film isn’t out to lecture us, allowing the characters to honor their own disreputable hungers. In his mixing of politics and pulp, and in his disregard for easy platitudes, Duke is reminiscent of Samuel Fuller, whom he worked with as an actor (Street of No Return) and whom he mentions as an influence in a new interview recorded by Criterion for this Blu-ray. Here and in other films, such as his extraordinary 1984 TV movie The Killing Floor, Duke fluidly homes in on how the macro textures of a corrupt society influence the micro details of everyday interactions. Every scene in Deep Cover is volatile, insofar as you never quite know where it’s going at any given minute, with long violent, absurdist riffs that reduce drug trafficking to a huge seriocomic dick-measuring contest.

Case in point: the moment in which Russell, assuming the role of dealer “John Hull,” watches as a drug lawyer and budding partner, David Jason (Jeff Goldblum), plays “slaps” with an upper-level lord, Felix Barbossa (Gregory Sierra). David has slipped in Felix’s estimation, as “Hull” has become his new prize catch. Throwing David’s Jewish identity in his face, Felix continues to slap the rattled man. Given Felix’s power, David knows he can’t retaliate against this humiliation, not yet at least. This scene rhymes with the first interaction between Russell and Carver, as Carver, like Felix, is empowered by status to do and crush whatever he pleases. David and “Hull” wish to rise in the drug game to achieve the same carte blanche, suggesting how capitalistic offenses spurn others in a game of free enterprise dominos. As David says to “Hull” about a potentially ultra-lucrative new drug, “500 million and no more nigger.”

A softer movie would allow us to enjoy Russell and David’s camaraderie, with their interracial bond letting white audiences off the hook. Their bond is enjoyable, but it’s always understood that these two are predators circling one another, and while David has to contend with his Jewish identity, he still has no empathy for how Russell must navigate the issues of his race. Goldblum, in a daring performance, makes David into an intellectual who fashions himself as a jazzy sleazebag for kicks. He’s a rich man playing, while other drug dealers are dying for a lifeblood, and this playing includes his fetish for black women, which leads to a brief conversation between Russell and David that’s too good and too funny to spoil.

Deep Cover, which abounds in actors playing against type—a notion that parallels the playacting of the characters—never allows you to get your bearings. Even Russell’s pseudo-father figure, a religious detective named Taft, is played by Clarence Williams III with equal parts zeal and earnestness that mark him as poignantly naïve and more than a little crazy.

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The notion of a world off its axis permeates the film’s look and sound. Deep Cover’s saturated colors suggest we’re in a funhouse underworld, and Duke frames characters head-on, as if they were speaking directly to the audience, airing their desperate arias of feeling. It’s difficult, and exhilarating, trying to reconcile the film’s astute political and racial framework with its neo-noir horror sheen, which suggests that even evil can be beautiful. That is, of course, the point. Deep Cover is an act of debauchery, a picking of social scabs, that knows it’s exactly that. Which is to say, its style is an extension of Russell’s tortured self-awareness.

Image/Sound

This new 4k transfer looks and sounds stunning. Cinematographer Bojan Bazelli’s purplish colors are phenomenally lush and vibrant, and the film’s highly varied shadows have a sharpness and body that wasn’t evident on earlier home-video releases. The English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track is also accomplished, boasting an explosive mix that honors the vibrancy of the gunshots and screeching tires as well as the bass and swing of the soundtrack.

Extras

In a new conversation, Bill Duke discusses his acting in milestones such as Michael Schultz’s Car Wash and John McTiernan’s Predator, as well as the development of his directorial voice through many TV assignments and the rise of black cinema in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’90s. (He was one of the first black directors to work regularly in American TV.) This supplement, as well as a discussion with Duke and Laurence Fishburne that was held at the American Film Institute Conservatory in 2018 and moderated by critic Elvis Mitchell, offers quite a bit of insight into how Duke’s acting for hire informed his encouraging, intuitive approach with actors.

Another conversation between film scholars Racquel J. Gates and Michael B. Gillespie elaborates further on the state of black cinema in the early ’90s, while a conversation with scholar Claudrena N. Harold and professor, DJ, and podcaster Oliver Wang contextualizes Deep Cover’s seminal title song (a.k.a. “187”), which is the debut solo single of Dr. Dre and is the first time Snoop Dogg was featured on a record. Rounding out a sturdy package are the film’s theatrical trailer and a leaflet featuring an essay written by Gillespie, which primarily analyzes how Deep Cover modernizes and subverts film noir from a black perspective.

Overall

The Criterion Collection’s lush transfer makes it clear now, more than ever, that Bill Duke’s Deep Cover is one of the great American thrillers of the early ’90s.

Score: 
 Cast: Laurence Fishburne, Jeff Goldblum, Victoria Dillard, Gregory Sierra, Clarence Williams III, René Assa, Charles Martin Smith, Alex Colón, Sydney Lassick, Kamala Lopez, Roger Guenveur Smith, Julio Oscar Mechoso, Glynn Turman, James T. Morris, Sandra Gould  Director: Bill Duke  Screenwriter: Michael Tolkin, Henry Bean  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 107 min  Rating: R  Year: 1992  Release Date: July 13, 2021  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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