I saw Monsters and Men without knowing anything specific about the movie because it is the first time that Reinaldo Marcus Green, a black Latino director, has a feature film in theaters. I wanted to support him, but I had one major misgiving about the movie. I already get an unhealthy free dose of unarmed black people getting shot on television and online every day so paying to see it in a theater seems like paying for trauma. It is also opening a week before The Hate U Give, which seems as if it is addressing similar topics and also has a black director so I’ll be paying to be traumatized two weeks in a row. It seems like a lot, but I did it.
If you decide to see Monsters and Men, you won’t leave the showing suddenly wearing ashes and sackcloth, but it is an uneven film that shows that Green has a lot of potential if he takes the right lessons from the feedback that he receives. We could get another Barry Jenkins in terms of preferring to show rather than tell and elevating silence to the most eloquent form of communication. If he takes the wrong lessons, then we will just get another Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.
While watching Monsters and Men, I immediately recognized that it was a fictional account of Eric Garner’s story, which made me gasp and want to run out of the theater because his particular story is one of the top three most tragic stories to me personally: how it had the effect of killing his daughter, how it mirrored Do The Right Thing and was clearly illegal based on the NYPD’s own standards, and the idea of who really got punished. The story is a triptych of a colorful, joyous and close-knit neighborhood occupied by a hostile force and the effect that the force has on three of its residents: a Hispanic man who films the shooting, a black cop and a black teenage boy. The shooting only intensifies existing pressure, and it leads to each character having to make a choice: do I choose the personal well being of my family or my community? How can I specifically make the greatest impact to make a difference?
Monsters and Men’s three stories are uneven, but they are at their strongest when they feel as if they are based on people who actually existed. The Hispanic man is clearly based on Ramsey Orta, who filmed Garner’s murder and has spent more time in jail for lesser offenses than an extrajudicial executor. Movies usually focus on everyday heroes, and people like Orta are probably long overdue for such treatment, but just as I began to settle in and embrace his story, the film switched gears to the most cinematically conventional portion of the movie, the portion devoted to Dennis, the black cop, played by John David Washington.
While watching Monsters and Men, I felt as if Dennis’ character was a cheat. Unlike the bookend characters, he has very few flaws except an understandable and relatable fear of internal backlash and persecution, and he felt fictionally perfect. He is like a walking, talking afterschool special simultaneously for the cops and black people who feel the unequal enforcement of the law. He felt more like a composite of several characters, and as if he existed to serve the purpose of describing all sides of the controversy, not a depiction of a three dimensional character although with such a versatile actor as Washington, who is paired with the consummately excellent Nicole Beharie, it is easy not to notice.
After watching the movie, reviewers met my expectations by seeming to prefer this section of Monsters and Men because you got to hear all sides of extrajudicial execution as if there is another side to even accidentally murdering someone. The sides should be, “It is wrong,” and “I’m sorry,” not, “Here are the ways that the victim is evil now that we know with certainty that the victim did nothing wrong because we don’t want to concede anything and risk any type of discomfort or liability because unlike every other profession, we never ever mistakes, and you should still trust us because we are scared because everything in society tells us that black to brown people are scary and dangerous and how do you expect me to overcome that when people with more resources can’t or won’t.”
I was unfazed when I discovered an interview in which Green said that Garner’s story and his friend, a white cop, inspired him to make Monsters and Men. To make it more palatable, he put his friends’ words in a black character’s mouth, a cynical and smart move so he wouldn’t lose his target audience that I spotted and despised instantly. I’m not saying that black cops don’t feel this way, or that I don’t want black actors to get work, but in this particular film, I felt alarm bells that this character did not feel as organic as the other two. I think that if he has a white cop friend who convincingly appealed to him, then create a white cop character whom we can’t dismiss as racist or part of the problem and can be just as persuasive while not being exactly like Green’s friend. If you’re going to make a movie largely based on reality, the fiction has to mirror the reality so when it departs from it, it still feels plausible instead of a sudden departure. Just Google cops playing basketball, and they are mostly white cops with black kids. It shouldn’t be so hard, but on some level, Green doesn’t buy it so he uses cinematic black face to sell the point. I understand that with a white cop character, you can’t explore the tension of being the authority and the victim of it, which is an important point, but I don’t think that the character can serve both functions when Green feels compelled to put his friend’s words in his character’s mouth during his off hours.
The last section of Monsters and Men is the best because it has the least dialogue, and we get a character who is on a journey similar to ours: how to live your life and find the best way to use your voice without tacitly cosigning a system that is victimizing you. The direction is at its strongest because we can see this young man’s thought process as he tries different ways that don’t entirely suit him to speak up. The depiction of the micro and macro aggressions that he experiences are not all related to the execution, but are part of a system of suppression that the viewer can instinctually feel the connection and discomfort and empathize with his desire to decisively reject and coexist alongside without selling his soul. When he finds his voice, it is not only the way that he speaks out against extrajudicial execution, but it is also a way of coming out of the closet as a black autonomous person in white spaces, and he will not permit projection of others’ views on to him. He will give a part of himself to society, but not all of himself. It is also the most individually effective way of speaking out that distinguishes him from others and cannot be dismissed in ways that larger protests can. The final scene was so uplifting and powerful that it retroactively made the weaker prior two sections stronger, and I did not regret paying matinee prices to see this film.