5/5
Steve McQueen’s Mangrove, the first film in his Small Axe cycle of films exploring the Black West Indian community in London from the ’60s to the ’80s, is an exquisite, deeply moving, film filled with incredible performances. The very first thing that struck me while watching this was that this is exactly what we need in this moment – more films, more television, more works of art that show the police as bullies, as racists, as authoritarians who target Black and brown communities rather than the heroes they’re typically depicted as onscreen. It seems like a small thing, and yet, in showing the naked cruelty and the toxic masculinity that pervades law enforcement, McQueen draws direct parallels between police harassment in the late ‘60s and today, along with the protest movements in both time to seek change to such “wicked” justice systems as our protagonists describe it. For a film that tackles such weighty material, it’s a wonder that McQueen never lets it collapse under the burden of sorrow or rage or pain. He consistently manages to find moments of deep joy and connection for his characters and their community – and even moments of authentic humor. McQueen has always been a master of finding moments of visual poetry within his films, and here is no exception: a still shot of a colander rocking back and forth on the floor until it stops after police have torn apart a restaurant; the reflection of a protest leader in a window becoming a silhouette in the rain; and at the show trial of the Mangrove 9, the light that comes in from outside their holding cells – blinding, brilliant, rapturous. The story itself is moving and an important work that still has resonance for us here and now, but the way that McQueen tells this story is transcendent.
