The Hurricane

THE HURRICANE

Rating: B
As I exited the theater, I was planning on giving this film an "A". I'd just witnessed a very skillful telling of the true story of Rubin Carter, the middleweight boxer whose style in the ring earned him the moniker "The Hurricane". In 1966 he and an alleged accomplice were accused of walking into a bar in Paterson, NJ and gunning down four patrons, three of whom died. Convicted by an all-white jury, he was sentenced to three life terms in what many observers came to believe was a gross miscarriage of justice. As portrayed in this film, Carter's conviction was not only a result of mistaken police work, but of the willful alteration of evidence by the lead investigator. Now, any story involving an innocent person imprisoned for 19 years is of course a tragedy, but aside from highlighting the tragic aspects and the injustice done, the film also deftly details the maturing of Carter's character through the ordeal.

Denzel Washington does a credible job of portraying Carter's spectrum of emotions as he gradually changes from an angry young man into one who begins to comprehend the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars. His best scenes are not where he's displaying righteous indignation at the turn of events (which has become somewhat of a Denzel Washington trademark), but in his interactions with his young supporter Lesra (Vicellous Reon Shannon) and his three Canadian guardians. The awkwardness of his first meeting with them is one of the most genuine moments in the film, where an eagerness to get along plays against an undercurrent of embarrassment and suspicion. They, for their part, sincerely want to help him, but realize they and he are worlds apart and initially have no common perspective through which to communicate. Lesra views Carter's story as motivation to correct the problems in his own life, in effect making something constructive from a situation seemingly without hope.

Okay, now for the bad news. Any time a fact-based movie succeeds in interesting me in its subject, I always want to know if events in the film really happened as portrayed. It's a chronic weakness of mine. What I found is enough controversy to put the case in a league with the JFK assassination, but at least several important items were definitely distorted in the film.

I can hear the familiar cop-out of "The film isn't meant to be a documentary" rising loudly from the audience, and I intend to address this issue at length in the "Blather" section of this website in a day or two. For now, let me state that distorting the truth certainly does matter. In a film which purports to detail a true injustice done to an individual, and his strength of character in dealing with it, the audience should reasonably be able to expect the facts to be set forth free of yellow journalism. If the story is so riveting, and the injustice so obvious, why can't the events be allowed to speak for themselves without sneaky omissions of details and outright misrepresentation? I don't know whether Carter was really guilty or innocent, but I can say the film loses a lot of its credibility the moment it starts lying to its audience.