Sinners

Who are the sinners in the title of Ryan Coogler’s astonishing new film? Early scenes offer us a few good suspects. There’s the local white grandee, Hogwood, a jovial, jowly menace who agrees to sell his mill to Elijah and Elias Moore, local Black twins better known as Smoke and Stack. The film takes place over a single day in October of 1932, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and most of its characters are impoverished Black sharecroppers still living on plantations. So it’s tempting to see Hogwood, in a tan Stetson hat and a wolfish grin, as the embodiment of America’s cardinal sin, racism. But Hogwood conducts his transaction without too much trouble and departs, leaving the twins in possession of a fine piece of property.

Smoke and Stack, both played by the sublime Michael B. Jordan, are no slouches either when it comes to sinning: Having fought in World War I, they spent a few years in Chicago, doing brisk and bloody business with Al Capone. Now they’ve returned to their hometown heavy with cash and ambition to open a nightclub where their friends could drink, gamble, fornicate and, most importantly, listen to great music.

That’s where another would-be sinner comes in, the twins’ cousin, Sammie, played by the excellent newcomer Miles Caton. His father is the local pastor, so everyone calls Sammie “Preacher Boy” and expects him to follow the family vocation. But Sammie is an exceptionally good guitar player, the sort of musician, an eerie voiceover informs us over the film’s opening credits, who can not only pierce the veil between past, present, and future but also, if he’s not careful, attract the attention of some truly unsavory forces. “You keep dealing with the Devil,” Sammie’s father tells him as he implores him to stay in church rather than go play music at the twins’ makeshift joint, “one day he’s gonna follow you home.”

(cont).
And follow, of course, he does. Or, rather, they do: No sooner do the twins and their coterie of friends begin the festivities than a knock comes on the club’s door. Outside are Remmick, Burt, and Joan, three very lovely white folks with big, ingratiating smiles. They’re not segregationists like those other bigoted boobs in town, they tell the suspicious twins as they plea for an invitation to join the party; they believe in equality, and music. To prove it, they pull out their banjos and sing a wholesome tune, looking and sounding beatific in the pale moonlight.

The charming white folk are entirely sincere in their good intentions and in their frequent evocations of peace, love, and kindness. Also, they’re vampires.

(snip)(rest of movie review)

The Black family wasn’t decimated by the Hogwoods of this world, rank racists determined to preserve their systems of oppression. It was annihilated by rejecting Frederick Douglass’ wise counsel and replacing pride, particularism, and the joys of tribal loyalties with the gauzy promise of universal, cosmopolitan liberalism and its miracle cures, which have turned out to be poison.

This turned out to be a really interesting and thoughtful movie review. I wouldn't have given this movie a second thought, but now I'll likely give it a watch sometime.

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