DETROIT

I've said it before and sadly I have a feeling I'll be saying it until the day I die but there are times when I've felt ashamed to be white, ashamed to belong to a race that over the centuries have felt they are not only superior to people of other ethnic backgrounds but have a right to kill them as well. Racists may be in a minority but in the overall scheme of things they represent a large minority and rather than stand up to them, often a blind eye is turned. Silence, tragically, gives consent.

Watching "Detroit" I felt ashamed and at times I felt physically sick. I was upset and I was angry. Kathryn Bigelow's magnificent new film is not specifically about the Detroit riots that occured 50 years ago; the riots form the backdrop to a film about one incident when three racist white police officers shot dead three Afro-Americans in a motel. It's a film that doesn't hide its anger; about as even-handed as Bigelow gets is in showing that, while the riots themselves were the direct result of racism, particularly on the part of the police, both sides were culpable in the outbreak of lawlessness that followed. But then Bigelow gets down to the business of showing just how one-sided the events that occured at the motel were. The police, and one officer in particular, (Will Poulter in Oscar-worthy form), are clearly monsters and the victims wholly innocent. The National Guard are bystanders who don't want to get involved while John Boyega's black security guard is caught helplessly in the middle, (at one point he's described as an Uncle Tom; he doesn't object).


Tragically, "Detroit" is not about events that just happened 50 years ago but which have been happening throughout America on a regular basis ever since, so Bigelow can't be accused of simply opening up old wounds. Still, there will be people who will say she should have left well enough alone and will ask if we really need a movie like "Detroit" at the present time. Unfortunately I believe we do and until such time when this kind of racism is totally eradicated we will always need movies like "Detroit".


Will it draw an audience, both in America and internationally? Will the prize-givers award it with the Oscars it so richly deserves? In a just world, and we know this isn't, Bigelow, scenarist Mark Boal and cameraman Barry Ackroyd would all be honoured. In the end, of course, it hardly matters, (though I would like to see the film get the audience it deserves); that it was made at all speaks volumes and gives credence to mainstream American cinema. "Detroit" isn't just the best film of the year; it's also the most important.