What 'Sing Sing' Knows to Leave Unsaid
The brilliant prison drama is savvy and sharp enough to eschew tired genre gropes.
A couple weeks ago, I saw one of my favorite movies of the year: director Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing. The film is based on the true story of inmates participating in Sing Sing prison’s Rehabilation Through the Arts (RTA) program. The story’s primary focus is on the relationship between program co-founder John “Divine G” Whitfield (Colman Domingo, one of our best actors giving another transcendent performance) and group newcomer Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin. Maclin, like most of the cast outside Domingo and co-star Paul Raci (who plays the program’s non-incarcerated director) is a real-life alumnus of the RTA program. If you’re looking for authenticity, you can’t do much better than people who lived in Sing Sing and participated in theatrical productions.
Perhaps that’s why Sing Sing so confidently and studiously avoids showing the trauma of prison life. I don’t think anyone who walks into a movie called “Sing Sing” is thinking “I bet life sure is chill and easy at this notorious maximum security prison.” Kwedar trusts his audience knows we’re all aware of how hard prison time can be, and since The Shawshank Redemption has been the top-rated movie on IMDb since basically the site’s inception, we know the horrors facing incarcerated men. Kwedar can speak volumes simply by showing the confines of Divine G’s cell or how the men all immediately fall prone to the ground in the yard when they hear an alarm so they don’t get shot. Trying to splice in moments from something like HBO’s infamously gritty prison-set drama Oz would not only be gratuitous, but fail to tell the audience anything new. We know that the U.S. prison system is big on punishment; Sing Sing answers with the benefits of rehabiliation.
And yet the movie never becomes a dry polemic, preaching its points at a friendly audience. Instead, it roots everything in the emotional interiority of these men, and why acting is such a restorative process. Similar to Ghostlight (another one of my favorite movies of the year), Sing Sing takes people dealing with trauma, and gives them a healthy outlet for exploring emotions in a safe space with a community eager to accept and embrace them. Divorced from any considerations of stardom (where the communal becomes competitive), there’s freedom for participants to seek their better selves. In this way, Sing Sing becomes a kind of prison break story where the men are allowed the freedom to be someone else and briefly inhabit a different world. While the movie has a touch of Shakespeare (Divine Eye has to master Hamlet’s “To be or not to be,” speech), the play they’re putting on is an original creation involving time travel, gladiators, pharoes, and more. That’s not to say that the actors are indifferent to the material being good; they simply want to put on a sci-fi comedy and not everything needs to be Shakespeare.
This sense of liberation prevades the entire movie. Rather than constantly being hemmed in by their situation, the RTA program allows the participants to be more and do more, and so it fits that Kwedar and co-writer Clint Bentley’s script wouldn’t run to the confines of what viewers expect when they see a movie set in a prison. The movie never pretends that violence, drug use, and other hardships don’t exist inside Sing Sing. However, it wisely keeps those elements at the periphery. In an early tense conversation between Divine G and Divine Eye, Divine G cautions Divine Eye not to bring his shiv to rehearsals because it could get the program canceled; Divine Eye counters that no one gets to tell him how to survive in prison, and Divine G should know better to have a private conversation in a dark corners. No one—not the characters and not the filmmakers—is ignorant of how prison has its own rules of survival; what Sing Sing shows is that there can be more for its inmates than surviving.
Too often, filmmakers fail to trust their audiences, and so they feel obligated to explain everything. Filmmaking ceases to be the art of showing, but instead becomes an unending series of expositions broken up by depiction so that the audience never feels “lost.” Sing Sing wisely trusts that its audience carries with it some foreknowledge of the U.S. prison system, and that even if that knowledge is minimal, they can gather that prison is a hellish environment. Rather than dwell in the trauama, Sing Sing constantly looks for the light coming through the bars. It says that these people are not the worst thing they’ve ever done, and that for those who seek rehabiliation, they can find something beautiful they never believed was possible.
Sing Sing is currently playing in limited release and continuing to expand across theaters nationwide.
Matt, you can imagine how happy I am to read this review and learn more about the film I have been reading and hearing about. I can't wait to see it, and appreciate your central point about what the film can rely on its audience knowing and revealing to us what we don't know -- how lives can be transformed by the arts, even in, or especially in an environment where transformation is a profound act of redemption.