Sing Sing
If you read the synopsis of “Sing Sing,” you might mistake it for a movie you’ve seen before. It’s a drama starring Colman Domingo as one of a group men in serving time in prison whose participation in a theater arts program gives them something to look forward to and improves them as human beings. It ends on what a studio boss might call an “up note.” But it doesn’t move or feel like any other prison movie, or movie about theater students, that I’ve seen, and its commitment to the truth of its characters — and of life itself — is rare and precious.
Writer-director Greg Kwedar and his script partner Clint Bentley developed the project after buying the rights to the 2005 Esquire article “The Sing Sing Follies,” by John H. Richardson. But they didn’t just shrink-wrap a true story in Hollywood cliches. They did what good journalists would do and re-reported the entire thing by interviewing people from the story as well as various participants in the Sing Sing correctional facility’s theater program. Then they cast some key roles with people who went through that same program.
And then—the crowning touch—they kept the movie loose and airy (but never slow) and allowed scenes to play out in a way that feels real, especially in the drama club meetings. Participants are shown rehearsing scenes, talking about their meaning and construction, giving each other notes on how to perform the material, and talking about how the art informs their lives (or the reverse). The result is probably closer in feeling to work by an English “realist” director like Mike Leigh or Ken Loach, letting the form of a scene or an entire sequence change according to whatever’s happening onscreen that’s most interesting and shooting it in a way that makes it feel like it’s all spontaneously happening. The film crew strives to get as nice a shot as they can without sacrificing that feeling of immediacy.
Domingo plays Divine G, one of many real people who went through the program. He was an actor and aspiring playwright in high school before his life went off the rails. He’s a devotee of theater, loves to act and read plays, and approaches it all with the quiet fervor of somebody who found religion behind bars. Some of the most memorable images in “Sing Sing’ focus on Domingo’s face in closeup as Divine G performs, thinks, or silently observes others.
The prison is a cold, cruel place full of violent men whose daily life revolves around trying not to antagonize the alpha dogs within the prison population or the guards looming over them. Discipline/punishment seems arbitrary. Cells get “tossed’ by guards in a heedless manner that seems meant more to humiliate and terrorize than find forbidden things.
