Review: When They See Us Is a Harrowing but Heavy-Handed Act of Protest

An indignant detective (William Sadler) stands up from his booth in a restaurant. He’s being questioned about inconsistencies in the case he worked on over a decade earlier: the vicious rape and beating of a jogger that led to the indictment of five Harlem boys—all people of color—who would come to be known as the Central Park Five. None of the detective’s conclusions seem to line up, and he doesn’t appreciate the implication that he and his entire department were willing to cut corners. “Justice was fucking served,” he says, framed with his back to a wall displaying an out-of-focus American flag. Then he walks out.

Such blunt-force imagery and dialogue is common in When They See Us. Ava DuVernay’s third collaboration with Selma cinematographer Bradford Young, the four-part miniseries is impeccably framed and beautifully, sparingly lit, all in service of a supremely worthwhile cause: to educate viewers about what became of these five boys, from just before their 1990 conviction up through their eventual exoneration. Unfortunately, the relaying of that lesson often veers into the trite, obvious, and maudlin. Indeed, you’re lucky if a scene goes by without the aid of some song’s perfectly descriptive lyrics or an overpowering score that Netflix’s subtitles describe for the hearing impaired with words such as “ominous” or “poignant.”

When They See Us is a handsomely mounted dramatization of the plight of these boys, of what was taken away from them due to their being targets of systemic racism. The injustices they suffer are horrific and are communicated as such through emotionally rich performances by both promising newcomers and seasoned character actors. The aforementioned restaurant scene will likely stoke your outrage because DuVernay, who has teleplay and story credits on every episode, dedicates so much of the preceding hour to the plight of Korey Wise (Jharrel Jerome), who was the only one of the boys old enough to be locked up in an adult prison. He went in at 16, and his very public conviction didn’t make his stint an easy one; he spent a lot of time in solitary by necessity, so that other inmates wouldn’t kill him. By the time you see Sadler’s detective sputtering to justify the boys’ coerced confessions, his lack of remorse—for having taken so many years of their lives away from them—is shocking.

It’ll probably make you mad, just the way it’ll make you mad to see the first episode’s depiction of the boys down at the police station, shot so small in otherwise roomy frames as to seem both alone and trapped by officers who don’t feed them and send their parents out of the room. The impact of the material speaks for itself, down to the simple fact that four of the boys are so young when they’re incarcerated that their release requires new, older actors to portray them. Only the 21-year-old Jerome plays his character all the way through the series, and he’s a standout in part because he’s so convincing at multiple ages. The younger Wise regards his situation with a disbelief that’s distinctly childlike; he’s still a little uncertain that any of this is for real, and before you know it, time has wiped away his doubts, his face now weighed down by the memory of his lost youth and his hellish time in prison.

But with four episodes, all over an hour and one close to 90 minutes, DuVernay affords herself plenty of room to get lost in her most didactic tendencies as a storyteller, insistent on underlining, then circling, then highlighting each point for maximum impact. She cudgels the most upsetting scenes with slow motion and centers characters with on-the-nose imagery, whether they’re in front of flags or illuminated by backward-pointing neon arrows that signify their unwillingness to face their own guilt. Characters spontaneously state rape statistics or say things like, “Survival at what cost?” Even what should be the series’s most damning moment, the fact that our dear future president took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the execution of these children, is weakened by DuVernay’s propensity for amplification. At one point, one of the mothers says of Trump, “His 15 minutes is almost up.”

Though the series’s flaws are present throughout, its earliest episodes are the strongest for their sense of momentum, detailing the boys’ railroading by a broken justice system. The shift of its latter half toward interpersonal drama does no favors for the weak writing, which devolves into a series of wooden platitudes and hoary, solitary confinement-induced fantasy before rushing to a bizarrely tidy conclusion that does little to contextualize the men’s ordeal as a larger systemic issue. Much of the denouement is dedicated to over-written verbal takedowns of some of the responsible parties, while the men’s decade-long legal battle for restitution is relegated to a line of text before the credits.

You rarely hear and see the words “Central Park Five” in When They See Us. That’s because DuVernay rightfully works to dismantle it, for the way it reduces the boys to mere numbers at the scene of their alleged crime. The series shows us their lives and their struggles, asserting the individuality previously stripped from them by an overzealous press and a racist justice system. Perhaps on some level, that’s all it needs to do, to clarify that Antron McCray is not Kevin Richardson is not Yusef Salaam is not Raymond Santana is not Korey Wise. As a piece of narrative storytelling, though, the series hits its thematic targets with such repetition at such close range that you begin to question the point of dragging this exercise to over four hours.