An early draft of this review was originally published on August 14, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
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“The glory of God is man fully alive.” Have you heard that before? It’s a quotation attributed to St. Irenaeus, and it has become a popular way of saying that when human beings live up to their potential we glimpse a revelation of the Divine. Unfortunately, like so many catchy lines in the social media age, the line has been ripped from a very particular context and, thus, sorely misinterpreted.
Nevertheless, there is something true in the botched, popular interpretation. Nothing makes me believe in God more than the wonder of a human being who exercises the capacities that set human beings apart from the rest of creation—the distinctive unity of the mind and the heart; the power of the conscience; the extravagance of the imagination in the achievement of art; the ability to break cycles of violence through suffering, sacrifice, and forgiveness. We can usually tell the difference between an actor pretending to play a complex man or woman and the real thing. Thus, it’s a rare and wonderful thing when an actor suspends our disbelief and moves us by bringing to life a convincing, compelling human being.
I thought of the St. Irenaeus line while watching Sing Sing. While movies about the power of art to change lives are common, and far too commonly formulaic and sentimental, this one is better than most. One reason for that is its roots in a real story: Sing Sing is based on the lives of real prisoners participating in a real arts program—Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA).
Further, the film features men involved in this program—some still incarcerated, some free—playing themselves. They’ve lived this story, and the authenticity they bring to the project shows.
And, much to my surprise and delight, director Greg Kwedar — he wrote the screenplay with Clint Bentley, took counsel from some of the men it concerns, and drew from a 2009 Esquire article on RTA — shows remarkable restraint through almost all of the film’s dramatic and emotional scenes. On only a couple of occasions in the film do I feel the filmmakers’ energy focused on moving moviegoers’ to strong emotion. If you’re like me, you have an allergy to heavy-handed tactics — extreme close-ups on exaggerated expressions, huge swells of dramatic music, and all the tools of sentimentality that fool us into feeling something instead of earning those emotions. Instead, Kwedar’s attention is focused lovingly and respectfully on the complicated men themselves: their strengths and weaknesses, their idiosyncrasies, their specific histories and hardships and hopes.
And because of that, I’m inclined to say that I was moved by sensing God alive and at work within their midst.
Uh-oh, a reader somewhere is saying. This is where he gets religious on us. A fair reaction. But before you bail, let me explain what I mean whey I say I sense “God alive and at work”:
I believe that God is Love. Most who don’t want to talk about God are happy to talk about Love. “All you need is Love,” right? “Love is patient, Love is kind, etc. … Love never fails.” I have yet to meet anyone who has a fundamental objection to Love as a necessity, as a pleasure, as a healing agent. So, if I ever refer to God in my perspective on what’s happening in a film, just assume that I am talking about that creative, active, inspiring, consoling, reconciling, and — yes — sovereign force in the world. I happen to believe it is not only sentient but the foundational intelligence in the cosmos. All of our unhappiness, all of our grief, all of our anger—all of those painful experiences are, in essence, evidence of ways in which Love has been harmed or compromised or resisted or denied. But Love is bigger than anything in its way. Love saves us all, and the sooner we know that, the sooner we can taste what some call the kingdom of God.
Even in Sing Sing.
Love is alive and well in this prison, among these men. Love is working on their wounds, attacking the hatred and the rage within them like white blood cells attacking a disease. Love is what the main character, Divine G, offers his fellow prisoners.
Played with such Theater-Guy Gusto by the charismatic Colman Domingo, Divine G is one of several characters here based on real people. (In fact, the real Divine G shows up here in an amusing, tongue-in-cheek cameo.) And it is the reliability, the generosity of his love that convinces us he might have the respect of suffering human being in that barred, barbed-wired institution. And one of the ways in which he makes Love real in the prison is to get creative — especially in a collaborative and communal way. When we activate our imaginations in the exercise of theater, playing parts of people different than ourselves, or attending to someone else’s play, we make ourselves vulnerable to change, to the expansion of our minds and hearts, because we occasion the opportunity to observe, understand, and thus love someone else. As the great Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner said (and as I incessantly quote him):
If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.
It is Love, I propose, that we observe at play among these prisoners. Love is not just doing a God-like work: Love is the manifestation of God in this place. Where two or more prisoners are gathered in a spirit of humility, generosity, compassion — Love! — God is at work. It is Love that they occasion as they surrender their egos, wrestle their demons, and serve the greater work of staging a play together. It is Love that we see scaring some of the men who have learned the hard way that no one can be trusted. It is Love that coaxes them out of their shells and helps them discover outlets for hurt and for passion in theatrical performance. Love helps them express the hurt and longing they have bottled up. Love reshapes the world for them. They can find some measure of freedom and peace even in the midst of their hard time. It might even help one or two of them survive to find their way back out into the larger world.
But don’t get me wrong: This is not a squishy, sentimental, bring-the-tissues tear-jerker. I suspect that this movie gives us a good sense of what it actually feels like to live in these rigid cells and corridors, and to crave freedom and beauty and nature and family. It’s not a comfortable place. Accentuating this, Pat Scola’s cinematography and editing is a familiar sort of cinema verité, but it isn’t showy — it doesn’t distract you with its endeavors to make us inhabit this space, feel these anxieties, get up into the often-hostile expressions of these men who are accustomed to fighting and defending themselves. These men aren’t accustomed to giving and taking criticism outside a context of violence, so every conversation carries a hint of battery acid, a sort of caustic energy that might suddenly explode. That instability and volatility is effectively captured here.
Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com compares the aesthetic to the ways in which Mike Leigh and Ken Loach compose scenes, and I can see that: There’s a sense of improvisation and unpredictability in many of these exchanges. When it comes to the narrow, discomforting mise-en-scene, I thought of the Dardenne brothers, whose masterpiece The Son (Le Fils) navigates the spaces of a carpentry workshop and a carpentry teacher’s austere apartment with a similarly up-close and semi-claustrophobic nervousness.
The emphasis given to crowded, confining spaces and to reserved, uneasy crowd dynamics are part of why the rehearsal space and the stage itself feel so alive, so liberating. They’re also why Domingo’s performance is so vivid and endearing. These are stark, unlikely contrasts to the day-to-day routines of incarceration. The RTA space is where these men discover they can breathe in ways that not even their Yard hours offer them. And their interactions with Divine G are of a quality that no other conversations have…
…until Divine G himself suffers one too many painful setbacks — and that sets us up to see that he is not invulnerable. In what stands as the film’s highest point of tension, we see a startling shift that reveals just how much effort it takes to maintain hope, to sustain the imagination, to cultivate Love in these hard spaces.
Unfortunately for me, this is also the only scene in the movie in which my belief in what I’m seeing really breaks. Some of that has to do with the direction: It’s as if we suddenly realize that the filmmakers have been calibrating everything to jolt us with this shake-up, and now they surrender their restraint. It felt too staged, too self-consciously Dramatic. What’s more, Domingo, whose best performances are always those in which he reins in his more flamboyant and extravagant capacities, goes very, very big in a way that made me feel a Deliberate Oscar Appeal for the first time. It’s not an egregious error or even a mistake; I’d call it a moment of obvious strain, a place where the film loses its balance ever so slightly.
But, unlike the other big movie this year that focuses on the redemptive power of theater,* it does recover that balance quickly. And even as we move toward some familiar resolutions — the big play performance, clips of The Real Events upon which the film is based, and a few moments of climactic hope — all of these are presented with admirable restraint and grace. At one point, we hear the men’s volunteer director, played with modesty and care by Sound of Metal’s Paul Raci, acknowledge the marvels taking place in their creative effort: “Who would’ve thought that the beginning of healing for the whole planet would start right here?” In most other movies about the power of art, that line would feel over-the-top, like it was insisting on meaningfulness that the drama hasn’t yet earned. But here, it feels right and true.
It resonates for me, above all, because of the performance of Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin as himself. Maclin plays a man who has buried his wounded heart beneath many layers of aggression and defense. He’s the one other inmates have to watch out for, the one you don’t want to cross. He’s the one whose nerves convince us that he’s been stabbed in the back before, and he just might lash out at someone who unwittingly walks to close to him. I suspect there will be heavy Oscar attention on Domingo’s performance, and rightfully so, but if I believed in the integrity of the Academy I would be out campaigning for Maclin. He’s the presence on screen that makes things feel dangerous and daring. He’s the one with the more dramatic arc, and every moment he’s onscreen I believe him. Most actors would love a chance to play the kind of caged-predator energy Maclin has, but what makes the performance so remarkable is how Maclin keeps his menace on “Simmer,” and slowly reveals a tender, insecure human being who still might be coaxed out to live in the harsh light of the real world. What’s more, he’s not treated as a charity case or a victim. He’s a complicated man with surprising curiosity and a promising intelligence when it comes to art and literature. A lot is going on beneath that unnerving exterior that he has cultivated for his own self-preservation.
It is Maclin, the actor and the character, who made me think of St. Irenaeus’s out-of-context quotation. Here is a human being who bears unfathomable suffering — some of it his own fault, much of it due to the world that conditioned him to live desperately. And yet, when he’s drawn into a work of imagination, those shields start to come down, and we see a brilliant soul. If that spark can be stirred up into a flame in a controlled space like the theater, we know his performance will be a revelation.
As an insecure schoolboy, I was taken under the wings of several observant teachers who believed in bolstering my confidence and boosting my creativity. As an English professor today, I have seen worried young men and women — some of whom came to school intent on taking dehumanizing courses on the way to a misery-making career — stumble into my creative writing classes or my film classes and suddenly awaken to other possibilities in the experience of art. When it happens, it really is like seeing a prisoner begin to believe that freedom is possible.
Sing Sing gets that. And, unlike most other films about the same idea, it makes me believe.
* I’m talking, of course, about Ghostlight. It’s a wonderful film in some ways—the performances, above all. But the severity of the spectacular, preposterous coincidence that the movie treats like a mind-blowing revelation really fractures that movie for me. I recommend it, and I enjoyed it; I may even have shed a tear or two. But there’s nothing nearly so contrived or frustrating in Sing Sing.