As played by Colman Domingo, John ‘Divine G’ Whitfield, is the heart of Greg Kwedar’s warm and sweet-natured true-life prison drama Sing Sing. As a founding member and key contributor to the ‘Rehabilitation Through the Arts’ (or RTA) programme, Divine G is part poet, part social worker, and part actor, all while fighting for his release from a sentence for a crime he did not commit. He is also, perhaps most importantly, one of the few prisoners in this movie who is not played by himself. It is Sing Sing’s greatest strength that it populates its cast with real former-convict RTA alums, adding a vital dash of deeply-felt authenticity to what is otherwise a very simple and by-the-numbers drama.
Though Divine G’s story is a consistent throughline of Sing Sing, it really centres on one of the many productions put on by the RTA troupe at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York State. Exhausted after finishing up a Shakespeare, the inmates decide they want their next project to be an original comedy – written by their civilian teacher/director Brent (Sound of Metal’s Paul Raci) – featuring ancient history, time travel, Freddy Krueger, and some Hamlet monologues. It’s these monologues that bring to the fore Clarence Maclin (playing himself) aka Divine Eye, who lands the role of Hamlet that Divine G had assumed was his.
Though Divine G’s ego does prickle, Sing Sing is mostly a story of these men working together to not just put on a play, but re-find the human and creative spark they lost over the course of long prison stints, which makes for a surprisingly tender tone. Kwedar and co-writer Clint Bentley (with material provided by the real Divine G and Maclin) avoid the usual cliches of prison violence and intimidation, instead focusing on building the community that this troupe provides its members.
It’s a refreshing approach in an otherwise very straightforward story. Events play out very predictably and the moment to moment dialogue is all a bit first draft, with either very little depth to what people are actually saying or big emotional monologues that are just way too on the nose. It leaves it up to this largely only semi-professional cast to bring the texture, and they mostly do so with flying colours. With Maclin out in front, these guys are all really compelling, a cadre of interesting, history-rich faces that give off a sense of powerful, moving honesty. Domingo himself is more of a mixed bag. As a standalone piece of acting, his performance as Divine G is, of course, an affecting one (he’s pretty much incapable of being uninteresting), but its much more obvious theatricality doesn’t always mesh with the unvarnished work of his co-stars.
The result it something that is more endearingly sweet than truly punchy (though a lovely warm colour palette and solid cinematography that uses every space in the prison to its fullest does elevate things). As awards season fast approaches, Sing Sing is being billed as the first real contender of the year and, though, somewhat underpowered as it is, I’m not 100% sure it will end up rising above the general noise of awards clamour, it is undeniably the sort of feel-good crowdpleaser that could go all the way.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 