What I'm Watching: Sing Sing

Art as rehabilitation, Oscars, and clouds...

It was hard to bring myself to watch another movie about incarcerated black and brown men, but I had a feeling this one was different. I finally got a chance to see it on a plane, and I was glad the couple next to me was asleep. I could cry my tears, joyful and bittersweet, without holding back. I could look at the clouds and unfold.

Sometimes the best ideas are so simple. This is a story about prisoners in Sing Sing who stage a production of Shakespeare’s King Lear. This is part of a rehabilitation program within the facility. What it does is it allows them to act outside of the narrow confines of how they must present themselves in the world to survive. They move outside the borders of masculinity, hardness, suppressed emotion, and anger, and they can be someone else for a while. They can be creatively human.

Colman Domingo stars as a wrongfully convicted playwright who helps lead the program. I strongly believe he deserves the Oscar for Best Actor.

I also love how the plot plays with the audience’s expectations. Without giving too much away, the ‘doomed’ character becomes something else entirely, and the ‘savior’ character ends up being the one who needs to be saved. The flow and the rhythm is natural, and I was surprised to learn most of the characters were playing fictionalized versions of themselves. A brilliant directorial choice to have these men telling their own stories, giving them a platform to be seen (think Nomadland).