A quarter of a century of cinema has passed, so we look back at some of the movies of the year 2000, beginning with Denzel Washington-starring boxing movie, The Hurricane…
There is perhaps a little bit of cheating going on by including The Hurricane in discussing a 2000 movie, given it was released on December 29th, 1999. It is more of a bridge, notable as the major cinematic offering over Millennium Eve; a film that sits between cinema’s first and second centuries.
Celebrated across film culture as among the greatest years in cinema history, 1999 has had a whole range of retrospectives devoted to it. These range from articles to podcasts to entire books devoted to its fusion of high-concept event movies, franchise films, and the big-budget legitimising of the Sundance indie-darling filmmakers who would build their careers on some of that year’s defining works. It was, looking back, a remarkable year to close out cinema’s formative century.
The year 2000 was always going to struggle in its shadow and, truthfully, it does. This is a year in which Mission: Impossible II was the most profitable box office hit. A year not without its triumphs, among them Ridley Scott’s Gladiator or Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, but beyond them, little that truly remains iconic. In 1999, we got such films as The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project, The Matrix and so on. And if any film manages to serve as a pointer to how 2000 would struggle to carve out the same kind of historical legacy as the year before it, then that film is surely Norman Jewison’s The Hurricane.
Though Denzel Washington remains a Hollywood titan, an actor who transcended the traditional limitations of African American stars in Tinseltown and re-defined himself decade after decade, Norman Jewison’s name has drifted into obscurity somewhat.
Jewison had been circling what would become The Hurricane for the better part of a decade, having become entranced by the miscarriage of justice that was the life of Rubin ‘the Hurricane’ Carter, a middleweight champion boxer who in 1967 was wrongly convicted for a double murder in New Jersey and spent almost 20 years in prison before a successful appeal overturned the verdict.
While incarcerated, Rubin wrote a relatively successful memoir, ‘The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender To 45472’, which conveyed his youthful struggles growing up impoverished in New Jersey in the 1940s, with spells in a juvenile detention centre and the US Army after managing to escape, before ending back up in prison as an adult. Rubin’s story, as developed by Jewison, defines the male Black American story: suspected, persecuted and dehumanised.
It’s understandable why Jewison would have been interested in the story. The Hurricane ends up serving as the third part of an unofficial trilogy of films tackling race and injustice in America, beginning with the seminal 1967 drama In The Heat Of The Night, starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, for which Jewison was nominated for an Academy Award. (In a sign of the times, Steiger won Best Actor for his relatively small supporting role; Poitier, despite his unforgettably commanding performance, wasn’t even nominated.)
Carrying the theme through into the lesser known A Soldier’s Story in 1984, which focused on the Jim Crow south at the end of WWII, Jewison near enough bookends his entire career with films designed to illuminate his own, liberal politics. It was enough to drive him away from Hollywood and the studio system he had transcended – he began making Doris Day movies – and to England, then Canada, avoiding the American New Wave of the 1970s. (Jewison’s future sports sci-fi Rollerball, released in the middle of the New Hollywood era of 1975, could be seen as an allegory for his battles with studio executives.)
For that reason, The Hurricane could have been more radical and less staid. It lacks the bite that In the Heat Of The Night certainly did, perhaps given that film was made in a far more febrile atmosphere than The Hurricane, sitting at the tail end of what history will surely record as one of the quieter, open and progressive decades of the 20th century. The black community and race issue rages on today, but you wonder what someone like Spike Lee then or Steve McQueen would do with the material in the 21st century.
One of Washington’s key, defining roles at the turn of the 90s was of course for Lee, starring in Malcolm X as the signature American civil rights icon. Denzel parlays some of that fire into Rubin Carter, a man who is principally a boxer, a former soldier, an unjustly-convicted felon, but for whom the civil rights movement ripples in the background. Yet there is never that profound, cathartic or devastating scene which pulls all of these themes and elements together.
It could be that Jewison focused so much on constructing the narrative behind the Hurricane’s imprisonment that his script and direction miss the fire behind the events themselves. Buoyed by a jazzy and sonorous score by the ever-underrated Christopher Young, and with frequent uses of the Bob Dylan song ‘Hurricane’ – which the singer-songwriter composed after visiting Carter in prison – Jewison’s direction captures mood and texture through various approaches. There are black and white re-creations of the Hurricane’s middleweight victories, and the 50s and 60s era in which the crime and Carter’s rise and fall took place are effectively realised.
The script, meanwhile, seems more concerned with assembling the pieces of the story, not always in a linear fashion, in order to allow for a final act which switches from character study to (fairly brief) courtroom drama, the outcome of which is fairly obvious. This always needed to be, as Dylan puts it, ‘the story of the Hurricane, the man whose part he was made to play’, and justice over Dan Hedaya’s corrupt, malevolent Italian-American cop always needed to be the outcome.
It often feels as though is there’s an angrier, more thrilling film underneath The Hurricane's fairly traditional Hollywood surface. Jewison’s film works to mythologise Carter, particularly in the eyes of formerly wayward black youth Lesra Martin (Vicellous Reon Shannon, perhaps best known as the son of the President on 24), who finds inspiration in Carter’s memoir, befriends him in prison and serves as the catalyst for his appeal and eventual release.
Jewison attempts to position Carter as a hybrid of Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King, with scenes in which he ruminates on the origins of his surname. “Hurricane is the professional name that I acquired later on in life. Carter is the slave name that was given to my forefathers, who worked in the cotton fields of Alabama and Georgia. It was passed onto me”. Yet often Carter is portrayed as beaten, ground down by the system, as opposed to containing the electricity Washington has displayed in similar roles.
Had this story been told in the 60s or 70s, or even today, you sense The Hurricane’s politics would have been less inert. The tail end of the 1990s lacked the momentum over the issue that the beginning of its decade contained, with Rodney King and the LA riots filling headlines. The Hurricane operates more as a historical relic free of the natural racist undertones in what happened to Rubin Carter, given he was persecuted by a collection of white police officers who just wanted to vilify a Black man who’d become a sporting and racial icon. Jewison’s film is more about the psychology of the man than the movement, and it suffers as a result, because you can feel the weight of that being held back. The script works harder to tug the heartstrings, crafting Carter as a folk hero to the next generation of disaffected Black youth, rather than looking back in anger.
The Hurricane also seems conscious of destiny. Rubin believes Lesra coming into his life is providence. One of Lesra’s Canadian foster family (a weird set up involving Liev Schreiber, Deborah Kara Unger and John Hannah) says at one point regarding the memoir, “sometimes you don’t choose the book, the book chooses you.” It pays only lip service to these bigger metaphysical ideas, committed to detailing events and the journey of Carter himself first and foremost. This does give the film heart, and that’s to its credit, but The Hurricane could have had soul and passion, and landed with a sucker punch. Norman Jewison’s final major film – indeed the one he claims to be most proud of – ends up staggering through to its final round having impressed, but never landing the knockout blow.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his podcasts and books, via Linktr.ee here.
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