I just watched Sinners with a friend. Knew almost nothing about it going in. I'm so frustrated. I feel like it was almost amazing and then made some baffling choices.
Here is an incomplete list of what I think Sinners got right:
-the cinematography. Gorgeous, wonderful. Like a painting.
- the music. I have only praise for the music, and I've been listening to it since I finished the movie. Incredible, beautiful, amazing.
- the acting. I can't think of any bad performances, I think everybody knocked it out the park on this one.
Also, shout out to the way characterization unfolds in the first half of the movie, simultaneously painting a picture of these people, their backgrounds, our setting, so much information is conveyed so incredibly well. I got to know these people and genuinely care about them and their lives.
Here is where Sinners loses me:
- the fake blood baffles me. It is one of a few indications of tonal confusion in this movie. The visuals are incredible, beautiful, and then there's this cheap shlocky horror movie spurting blood. Why?
- why are we bringing up this idea, over and over, of music letting the devil in? The whole movie is framed around it, the opening and ending, half the premise is built on it. Sammie has to let go of his guitar. His guitar brought him in contact with vampires, he only escapes by breaking the guitar, and in the church at the end he must let go of the guitar - his last tie to the awful ordeal of that night. And then immediately we find out during the credits that he continues to play music and becomes a successful musician. I don't get it.
- this is a minor thing, but the confrontation with the vampire at the very end, in the lake. I specifically noticed the moon in the sky behind them. A minute later, the sun is rising.
- the three major decisions that let the vampires in are all made by women.
First, the Irish vampire convinces the wife of a Klansman to let him in. It's not the Klansman who lets him in. It's her. The vampire is then able to evade the Choctaw and create two more vampires.
Mary, a white passing biracial women, is the narrative's Trojan horse to get a vampire into the juke joint. That's a fucking choice. Black people inside, dangerous white people outside, and it's a biracial woman who brings that danger in to the black people, which she starts by killing a black man during sex.
Finally, it's Grace, the Chinese woman who had been accepted into the otherwise all-black juke joint endeavor. If she had stayed quiet, they could have waited out the vampires until the sun rose. But she lets them in and is the reason there aren't more survivors than Smoke and Sammy.
This is a pattern. But let's talk about the Irish vampire for a minute.
So, this movie is about mass lynching. Right? The juke joint was a setup. The Klan took the brothers' money, but they were always going to reclaim the mill and kill all the black people inside.
Instead, a white vampire carries out the massacre in the night. A supernatural force as a metaphor for the Klan. I understand that.
Why is he Irish? Irish people's oppression has a few similarities to black people's, but not many. Irish people were colonized, stolen from, they are victims of genocide and many well documented abuses at the hands of the English. They were never slaves. Neither were they ever an oppressing force over black people. Like, you can talk about microaggressions, about appropriation, I'm not saying there isn't friction between these communities. But Irish people have never had systemic power over black people. To use an Irish immigrant as your metaphorical stand in for the fucking Ku Klux Klan is baffling to me??? Like, am I forgetting some huge historical event? If it is trying to say that being oppressed in your own right doesn't stop you from turning around and doing the same thing to other people, I can...kind of see that? The Irish vampire calls out Christianity as a colonial religion and then forcibly submerges Sammy in the river multiple times, which i did interpret as a metaphorical forced baptism.
If the vampire were Dutch, or English, or French, I feel i would understand better. To me it seemed like an odd dig at Irish people instead of aiming that ire towards.....the Klan. Who are right there. Why is the immediate and violent harm that we see done by a victim-of-colonization-turned-metaphorical-colonozer instead of, like. Just a colonizer?
Which takes us back to the women. Why is it their fault? One of those decisions (except Mary's story, the symbolism is VERY clear there) wouldn't mean too much, but all three together is a pattern. Jim Crow, the Klan, lynchings, these are atrocities that were enacted by white men. But except for, again, the Irish immigrant vampire, white men are barely in this movie. The people whose decisions we're cursing in this movie are women.
Speaking of the Klan. When they do show up at the end. The sequence of Smoke killing them all. That whole sequence is a cathartic, power fantasy, action movie sequence. It's good for what it is. Satisfying. It is not the same genre as the rest of the movie. I'm not 100% sure all the weapons he uses were even invented at the time. I wanted to like this sequence, and if it were in a different movie, I think i would have.
Man, I'm still thinking of that Irish vampire... the two music sequence, I Lied to You and The Rocky Road to Dublin, I understand what they were doing with them. I Lied to You is a pulling together of culture, past present and future. The Rocky Road to Dublin is only one culture being imposed over all the participants. And that's just not something Ireland...has done. Again, it's a baffling choice to me.
Speaking of those songs. I really thought the juke joint was going to burn down. We see it in I Lied to You, when the past and future meld together. The whole rest of the movie i was waiting for and dreading it. When the Klan showed up, I thought ah. I see. Smoke is going to burn down the mill with them inside. In some way, the dance of all those black people would have granted them a symbolic agency, a participation and presence in the deaths of the Klan who hated them so much. But no, Smoke kills them all outside.
Also this movie does that thing i hate where they reference something we've already seen but also cut to a flashback of it just in case we're stupid. Please stop doing this, movie directors.
Man. I want to like this movie so bad. Annie was great, Delta Slim was great, Sammie was great, the Smokestack brothers... all these characters are wonderful. My issues are solely with the narrative decisions being made. Am I missing something? I've poked around at reviews, and everybody seems to love it. Did anyone else come out of this movie feeling tonal confusion?
