Review: Monsters and Men

Like many films tackling socially inflammatory material, Monsters and Men is constrained by its politics.

Monsters and Men
Photo: Neon

Like many films tackling socially inflammatory material, Monsters and Men is constrained by its politics. Examining the frequent murders of black men by unpunished white police officers, writer-director Reinaldo Marcus Green centers his film on three protagonists, all men of color, who are defined entirely by the means in which they are oppressed, and by their success or failure to buck an overtly racist system. We learn little about these men’s personalities, quirks, or belief systems, and Green doesn’t allow for spontaneous behavioral moments that might beget drama at the expense of his sermon. The men are even posed and filmed in the same way: often in rapturous close-ups, with their eyes locked in expressions of pained, pleading earnestness. Green’s theme—that racist cops are an unchecked symptom of an epidemic of suppression—is inarguable, but Monsters and Men encourages the very bored complacency that it’s attempting to combat.

One night in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood, racist cops kill Darius Larson (Samel Edwards), a fixture of the community. Six officers surround Darius, and he’s shot for apparently reaching for one of the cop’s guns, though Darius’s friend, Manny (Anthony Ramos), films the incident on his phone, proving the killing to be an act of brutality. In this sequence, which is the heart of the film, Green’s cinematic imagination isn’t able to do justice to the volcanic subject matter, as Darius’s killing is murkily staged, with the camera remaining melodramatically on Manny’s shocked face. It would have been more logical and disturbing, however, to show Darius’s murder clearly, underscoring the preceding obfuscation for the obvious, unforgiveable lie that it is.

Manny is a reformed drug dealer on the cusp of getting a new job, allowing him to provide for his mother, girlfriend, and daughter, and so his ethical dilemma over his phone footage is coming at the worst possible time. And the film’s other protagonists find themselves at a similar moral juncture, debating the weight of their private gain against the public good. This contrived, screenwriter-ly coincidence emphasizes another of the film’s problems: All three men at the film’s center have the same narrative, which is capped off with three non-endings that are meant to signal Green’s realist bona fides. Monsters and Men has an idea for a premise rather than a plot, as it circles Manny, and, later, Dennis (John David Washington) and Zyric (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) as they marinate in guilt and complicity-by-inaction.

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Dennis is a police officer, a young African-American who’s devoted to an institution that he knows to be a menace to his people. (In the film’s opening, Dennis is stopped by a cop for no reason himself.) Washington, who recently played a variation of this role in Spike Lee’s daring and imaginative BlacKkKlansman, gives Monsters and Men a welcome shot of bitter, charismatic tension. This segment also benefits from Green’s two best cinematic flourishes: a prolonged shot in which Dennis and Manny survey one another on opposite sides of a one-way interrogation mirror, and a landscape in which the murdering cops are matter-of-factly shown to be harassing another person of color. The interrogation scene succinctly visualizes how a system separates two men who are essentially in the same social boat, while the shot of the cops at work illuminates their ritualistic cruelty with chilling casualness. But Zyric’s story, which suggests an allegory for Colin Kaepernick’s activism, returns the film to speechifying ground, following a prodigious high school baseball player as he wrestles with a dawning political consciousness.

As this sometimes moving film winds to a close, a question may spring to mind for the viewer: Why not devote a segment of the film to Darius’s killers? Such empathy, which was on generous and disturbing display in BlacKkKlansman, might’ve shook Monsters and Men up, allowing it to feel dangerous. Which is to say, Green speaks too comfortably to his choir.

Score: 
 Cast: Anthony Ramos, John David Washington, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Samel Edwards, Chanté Adams, Giuseppe Ardizzone, Nicole Beharie, Cara Buono, J.W. Cortes, Angel Bismark Curiel, Christopher Jordan Wallace  Director: Reinaldo Marcus Green  Screenwriter: Reinaldo Marcus Green  Distributor: Neon  Running Time: 95 min  Rating: R  Year: 2018  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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