With Detroit, her latest feature, director Kathryn Bigelow has done something unusual: she’s made a film that fits all the criteria for what a “Kathryn Bigelow movie” should be, yet one that doesn’t much feel like a “Kathryn Bigelow movie.” Like several of Bigelow’s other feature-length efforts, Detroit is a critique of both institutional corruption and law enforcement as well as an examination of masculinity. But tonally and structurally the work feels like the product of a different director—until the credits rolled and the onscreen text read “Directed by Kathryn Bigelow,” I wondered whether I was seeing something helmed by someone else entirely.
Bigelow and Boal’s decision to zero in on the Algiers an hour into the movie is a deliberate strategy. The obvious and worthy reason for structuring the film this way is to provide the proper context for the Algiers raid—the chaotic environment in which the event took place, not to mention the historic and socioeconomic factors that help to explain both why some police officers so grossly abused their power and why such behavior was tolerated. But another, more manipulative motive is to take the viewer off guard, which makes the Algiers scenes more unexpected and thereby more horrifying. This wouldn’t be problematic if Detroit were more tonally cohesive, but that’s not the case—it’s a mess, which undercuts the power of the Algiers section.
Detroit, on the other hand, is transparently an activist film. As a result it’s dictated more by the views and emotions of the filmmakers than by artistic judgment or taste. Some viewers might think that’s the appropriate treatment for such a serious and important subject, but I’d argue that such an approach makes the movie less memorable. Bigelow and Boal ambitiously try to cover a lot of ground, but they’ve done so unevenly, and watching Detroit is ultimately an unnecessarily frustrating experience. v
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
