WASHINGTON — It was a true story of criminal injustice detailed on the podcast “This American Life,” before winning the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Now, the true-crime prison drama “Crown Heights” opens in select theaters nationwide.
Set in 1980, a jury wrongfully convicts Colin Warner (Lakeith Stanfield) of a murder in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, due to the testimony of two teens who were manipulated by the police. Thus, Warner serves 20-plus years for a crime he didn’t commit, while his best friend Carl “CK” King (Nnamdi Asomugha) is determined to bring truth to light and overturn the conviction.
Don’t let the indie label fool ya; plenty of familiar faces pop up. You’ll recognize Colin’s initial defense lawyer as Nestor Carbonell, who starred in A&E’s “Bates Motel” and coincidentally looks like Anthony Perkins. Meanwhile, his second defender, Bill Camp, saved Riz Ahmed in HBO’s “The Night Of” (2016) and Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga in Jeff Nichols’ “Loving” (2016).
In Camp’s camp is former NFL All-Pro Nnamdi Asomugha, who was once an interception machine and now shifts from defensive back to legal defense team. In case you’ve been paying closer attention to your fantasy football draft than your IMDB page, Asomugha has quietly transitioned into acting after TV’s “Friday Night Lights.” Here, he’s a pleasant surprise.
Still, the real reason to see “Crown Heights” is for the breakout lead Lakeith Stanfield, who recently appeared as Snoop Dogg in F. Gary Gray’s “Straight Outta Compton” (2015) and the brainwashed victim in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” (2017). In “Crown Heights,” he is a revelation, mining enormous empathy with wounded expressions, body language and dialogue: “Most of these prisoners, they know deep down they put themselves here. I don’t have that comfort.”
It’s the best line in a script by writer/director Matt Ruskin, who’s remained relatively under the radar despite being nominated for Best Narrative Feature at South By Southwest for “Booster” (2012) and co-producing Bryan Cranston’s crime drama “The Infiltrator” (2016). Now, “Crown Heights” heralds him as a director to watch, showing quiet promise and cinesthetic chops.
During the guilty verdict, you’ll notice that he tilts the camera into a dutch angle (diagonal shot) to signify Colin’s world turning upside-down. This theory holds true with another dutch angle the first time we see his prison cell. It is proven a third and final time when Colin is denied parole. Such repetition is when a shot moves from stylish to consistently symbolic.
Throughout the prison sequences, Ruskin offers kinetic moments to show Colin’s caged emotion. When a guard whacks him in the head, the camera tips sideways to the floor like “Mean Streets” (1973). When the guards carry him to a brutal beating, the camera looks up from underneath in a disturbing tracking shot. And when Colin runs circles in his tiny prison cell, Ruskin intercuts it with a flashback of him running circles as a teen in his native Trinidad.
Of course, it’s not all flashy camera tricks. Sometimes, it’s something as subtle as a lens flair showing a ray of hope as Colin talks to his grandma on the phone. Or, it’s the mise-en-scène of a sign reading “All Phones Are Monitored” above his prison phone. This isn’t accidental; there are two phones that he could have used, but Ruskin smartly chose the one under the sign.
Underlying these choices is a stinging social commentary on the U.S. criminal justice system, as archival footage shows presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton cracking down with crime bills, punctuated by New York Governor George Pataki urging the death penalty. These political statements are juxtaposed with a final stat: “There are 2.4 million people in prison in the United States. An estimated 120,000 prisoners are innocent.”
This recalls something Camp says while trying to overturn Colin’s wrongful conviction: “If Colin Warner had lived in Texas, Florida or Louisiana, he would have been executed long ago.” It makes you wonder how many other Colin Warners have been put to death over the past several decades or are currently sitting on death row knowing they did nothing wrong.
Thus, “Crown Heights” puts a face to the social inequities chronicled in Ava DuVernay’s brilliant documentary “13th” (2016), which would have won the Oscar if it arrived a year later, as the rules changed to exclude episodic TV docs such as “O.J.: Made in America” (2016).
In the end, the procedural drama never quite rises to the emotional heights of previous wrongful-conviction flicks like “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994), “The Green Mile” (1999) or “The Hurricane” (1999). But if you want a more subtle alternative to Kathryn Bigelow’s great but grisly “Detroit” (2017), this film is for you, culminating with Leon Bridges’ spiritual “River.”
While Morgan Freeman taught us to get busy living or get busy dying, “Crown Heights” teaches us to get busy presuming innocence until proven guilty — and sometimes long after.
