Night Catches Us (Saturday, December 11, 2010) (156)

Night Catches Us is a movie about a guy named Marcus (Anthony Mackie) who returns to his old neighborhood in Philadelphia in the late 1970s after he was forced out years earlier for working with the cops against a fellow Black Panther. When he gets back, he immediately begins flirting with his old flame Patricia (Kerry Washington) who is a lawyer still working in the community, helping former Panthers and other guys on the edge of society.

She has moved up in the world and now has a daugher, Iris, but she's still a radical. He's less of a political zealot and trying to get his act in gear and restart his life. As he's trying to do this, he is caught up in old power games with the new community boss, Do-Right (Jamie Hector, Marlo Stansfield from The Wire) as well as a new generation of kids who want to stand up to the Man like their parents did.

This has all the makings of a great movie: a great cast, an compelling story, a score by Philly natives The Roots, but it just never totally comes together very well. I think the main problem is the script and direction by newcomer Tanya Hamilton. The story moves along at a very slow pace with each scene like an interesting one-act play (it's very stagy), but the totality is so episodic that it's hard to follow the narrative. Each scene never totally connects to the one before it or the one after it very well. You get a general feeling for what is happening, but it never really gels very well. One of the main relationships, that of Marcus with Iris, sorta sits there looking at us, but not really moving much at all. All in all, the story is more complicated than is necessary, but then the mysteries are revealed in a very clumsy way.

There is a lovely 1970s look to the whole thing, with great costumes, production design, and cinematography - and if there's one thing that Questlove and the Roots crew do well its make a functional representation of a bygone sound. But aesthetics is basically all that this film has going for it. Hamilton uses very nice musical interludes with still photographs throughout as well, including one really wonderful montage set to Syl Johnson's Is it Because I'm Black... but sadly it doesn't really fit in with the flow of the film. (Also a shame is the Roots' song over the end credits, which is much too modern and references Rwanda in one verse.)

I guess this shows that Hamilton has an interesting voice, but one that still needs a good deal of work to polish. Perhaps she would do better with a script by another person.

Stars: 2 of 4