Sing Sing

“...And ere a man hath power to say ‘Behold!’

The jaws of darkness do devour it up,

So quick bright things come to confusion.”

– William Shakespeare, A Midsummer’s Night Dream.

Thus begins this year’s “feel-good” film, Sing Sing, based on the 2005 Esquire article aptly titled “The Sing Sing Follies: A Maximum Security Comedy”. Colman Domingo is Divine G, a wrongfully incarcerated inmate at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, who uses the medium of performance art to channel his emotions. He leads a small but mighty group of inmates who are guided by theatre director Brent Buell (Paul Raci), who is part of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program. Together, after recruiting more members to the group, they begin to stage their newest play, Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code. All the while, Divine G bonds with fellow inmate Divine Eye and slowly forms a connection with him as production of the play begins. 

It’s difficult to really parse what to write for a summary in part due to the lack of story at hand here. Sing Sing is a film more concerned with the construction of character as opposed to plot, as evidenced by its inclusion of many formerly incarcerated members of the RTA program at Sing Sing. And that is certainly playing to Sing Sing’s presumed strong parts, with the story of Maclin, here playing himself as Divine Eye, being particularly evocative to the viewer. Similarly, upon hearing the story of Divine G’s incarceration, it’s hard for most viewers to not feel overwhelmed by the film’s mere observation of his imprisonment and our powerlessness in being able to help and console him on his failed parole hearing.

If it feels like I’m walking in circles, it’s really because there’s not much flesh left on the bones of Sing Sing. Attempting to sell this feature is like trying to find the Zodiac killer: why bother to attempt a Sisyphean task? There’s little incentive to do so for a film so bafflingly critically lauded, a film so built on moments that it fails to connect the pieces of its story together. We barely learn anything about anyone in this facility, why they got into this situation in the first place, why they joined the RTA program, who they are, or what their life motivations are. And sure, there are a lot of characters here, but almost all (besides Domingo and San José, who plays Divine G’s good friend Mike Mike) of these inmates’ actors are former inmates with real lives to tell.

Reading the article this film is based on is a refreshing change of pace, because you see that although Richardson is not particularly competent at stringing a cohesive narrative together in his article, he actively cares about the lives of each inmate. About halfway through the article, he begins to spotlight the stories of these inmates, what they did to get in here, and how joining the RTA has changed their lives for the better. To quote from the article, Richardson shows how these inmates “know the difference between ‘making a mistake’ and committing a crime”. This is fascinating stuff, and the article goes on to further detail the author’s conflicted thoughts between enjoying these plays and then coming to the realisation that these plays were made by killers. He then describes this sense of shame that comes from appreciating work made by criminals. The dichotomy presented here feels refreshing on its own, not merely because nothing this thought-provoking is ever raised in Sing Sing, but because it proves that a nuanced exploration of this dichotomy is possible.

Kwedar, on the other hand, gives off the air that he cares about his characters, but does little of the footwork needed to push through the emotional moments, instead relying on the cues of the credits to roll to do the heavy lifting. And perhaps we are all indeed crying tears of joy to see this limp and weak excuse of a film to be finally over. It’s not enough that one of the only fictional characters in this film dies from a brain aneurysm, of all things, making the already pitiful Divine G’s life even more painful. Sure, it may be based in truth, but if the film didn’t feel so shallow before this, it certainly does after. 

There’s so little being foregrounded in this story besides the central relationship between Divine G and Divine Eye, riddled with the screenwriting clichés they encourage you to write with in Film School. You wonder if these filmmakers have even interacted with a person before, since almost nothing being said feels natural. These meat puppets are being dragged across the screen with an almost robotic cadence, plodding along as Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley pen these scenes with aplomb. I’m not even sure how you can mess up an ending to something this feel-good and obvious, but if there’s something that can go wrong emotionally, this film does it. 

To bring it back to the Shakespeare quote first chanted by Domingo’s Divine G from A Midsummer’s Night Dream, the jaws of darkness do seem to devour it up. They lurch across the screen and gnaw in the minds at large for this mostly toothless story. It’s both unimaginable and completely foreseeable how a mostly-white audience saw Sing Sing not for what it is, but what it isn’t – “a story of resilience, humanity and the transformative power of art”. For a play about love to show up in a film made with surprisingly little amounts of it, the choice of quote is comically ironic. Should Kwedar and Bentley choose to live a second career as comedians due to this unintentional choice on their part, I would salute to that. But for now, I think they should let people who actually understand the systemic follies of the prison system tell these stories. 

4/10