THE HURRICANE by Norman Jewison
December 9th, 2004 by Andre Soares
The Hurricane (1999)
Direction: Norman Jewison. Screenplay: Armyan Bernstein and Dan Gordon, from Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter’s The 16th Round, and Sam Chaiton and Terry Swinton’s Lazarus and the Hurricane. Cast: Denzel Washington, Vicellous Reon Shannon, Deborah Kara Unger, Liev Schreiber, John Hannah, Dan Hedaya, Debbi Morgan, Clancy Brown, Harris Yulin, David Paymer, Rod Steiger
MISJUDGMENT AT JERSEY
Like Stanley Kramer, Norman Jewison has often been dedicated to commercial filmmaking with a socially conscious edge: labor relations in F.I.S.T.; corruption in the U.S. justice system in . . . And Justice for All; religious fanaticism in Agnes of God; anti-Semitism in Fiddler on the Roof; and racism in both A Soldier’s Story and the Academy Award-winning cop thriller In the Heat of the Night. Never a brilliant director, Jewison has at least managed to imbue most of his films with at least a modicum of depth.
The Hurricane, the story of the wrongful imprisonment of rising boxing star Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, should have been ideal material for Jewison’s talents. Yet, the results of the director’s latest take on racism and legal corruption are, to put it mildly, highly disappointing.
Jewison’s tendency to simplify his stories in order to make them more "accessible" is taken to extremes in The Hurricane, thus diluting the complexity of the real-life drama while turning Denzel Washington’s Carter into a B-movie victim-hero. Bits of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables are thrown in among the film’s stock-in-trade characters and situations, with the result being a tedious, gooey mess.
In the screenplay, credited to Dan Gordon (who also wrote the prison drama Murder in the First) and Armyan Bernstein, a Javert-like police officer, Inspector Della Pesca (Dan Hedaya), takes most of the blame for Carter’s imprisonment. The chief problem with that dramatic device is not that Della Pesca is a bastardized version of Hugo’s Javert or even that he is a fictitious character (in part inspired by Lt. Vincent DeSimone, the lead detective in the actual case), but that by focusing on one racist white police officer The Hurricane fails to deal head-on with the issue of endemic racism within the U.S. justice system.
To counterbalance Della Pesca’s ugliness, the film’s heroes are as shiny and perfect as Denzel Washington’s teeth. Carter’s four-year prison stint (for having committed three muggings) goes unmentioned, for The Hurricane must be portrayed as a locked-up summer breeze so we can empathize with him.
Tackling a role devoid of complexity, Washington adds extra wattage to his performance as if to compensate for his character’s vacuousness. He twirls his mouth in frustration and bares his teeth in anger, but his performance is ultimately unsatisfying because those facials tricks are there to make us forget that precious little is going on inside. (For his thoroughly convincing tooth-baring, Washington was nominated for an Academy Award and received the best actor prize at the Berlin Film Festival.)
Much worse is the ungainly sight of a trio of nice Canadians (Liev Schreiber, Deborah Kara Unger, and John Hannah), who are so pathologically nice they should have all been committed to a lunatic asylum. Unfortunately, however, the three Mountie wannabes end up in New Jersey doing their utmost to save Carter. (According to New York Times investigative reporter Selwyn Raab, all the evidence that led to Carter’s freedom was unearthed by his defense lawyers.)
The film’s non-linear narrative, which takes the viewer back and forth between Carter’s youth, his (black-and-white) boxing years, and his time in jail, is the only non-conventional aspect of The Hurricane. Apart from that, Jewison’s anti-intolerance diatribe is all impassioned speechifying, slow-motion fighting, gnawing teeth, and hokey lines of the type "You sound more like a man every day."
By opting to dumb down the complex story of Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, the director and the screenwriters have thrown aside the opportunity to present a serious — and, in this age of Patriot acts, quite relevant — indictment of the U.S. justice system.
Synopsis:
Boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter (Denzel Washington) is about to fight for the world championship title. Fast forward to a penitentiary in Trenton, NJ, where the Hurricane is doing time for the murder of several people at a neighborhood bar. The action then jumps to Canada, where the Hurricane’s autobiography ends up in the hands of a young, uncultured black man, Lesra (Vicellous Reon Shannon), who is living with three liberal-minded white Canadians, Lisa (Deborah Kara Unger), Sam (Liev Schreiber), and Terry (John Hannah) at a local commune.
Lesra’s enthusiasm for the Hurricane’s story arouses the interest of the three Canadians. As a result, the quartet begins to investigate the crime. They discover that, following a knifing incident when the boxer was just a little kid, a racist police detective, Della Pesca (Dan Hedaya), has set out to keep the Hurricane behind bars.
Despite the unwillingness of the New Jersey authorities to reopen the case, the determined Lesra (for whom the Hurricane has developed fatherly feelings) and his Canadians will keep on fighting until the innocent man is released from jail.
DVD:
The Region 1 DVD offers the following extras:
- Audio commentary by director Norman Jewison
- The infomercial "Spotlight on Location: The Making of The Hurricane"
- Deleted scenes with commentary by Norman Jewison.
A Touchstone Home Video release.
Notes:
A furore erupted upon the release of The Hurricane, whose makers were accused of recklessly distorting the truth. New York Times reporter Selwyn Raab, who had covered the Hurricane Carter case in detail, wrote a scathing piece deriding the film’s approach to its subject.
In the article, Raab states that The Hurricane "presents a false vision of the legal battles and personal struggles that led to Carter’s freedom and creates spurious heroes in fictionalized episodes that attribute his vindication to members of a Canadian commune who unearth long suppressed evidence. While glorifying the Canadians, the film plays down the heroic efforts of the lawyers whose strategy finally won the day for Mr. Carter. And virtually obliterated in the film version is the vital role played by John Artis, Mr. Carter’s co-defendant, who was also wrongly convicted and imprisoned for 15 years." New York Times, December 28, 1999.
In the same New York Times article, Raab added that there never was a racist Javert-like cop (played in the film by Dan Hedaya), and decried the manner in which Carter’s hardly squeaky-clean early life was sanitized.
…
At the end of The Hurricane, we are told that the state of New Jersey appealed The Hurricane’s release all the way to the Supreme Court. It lost in 1988, when the Court upheld the latest ruling. Carter moved to Canada and became executive director of the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted.
…
When The Hurricane was shown at the White House, then-President Bill Clinton praised Rubin Carter for his courage and determination. In regard to that visit, Leon Friedman, one of Carter’s lawyers, wrote in the New York Times, "No one mentioned the fact that in 1996, Clinton signed the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, passed by Congress, which makes it virtually impossible for another unjustly convicted prisoner to find justice in the way Hurricane Carter did."
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