Few contemporary actors have the presence of Colman Domingo. Over the past few years, with bossy performances in Rustin and The Color Purple, he has emerged as a master of both swagger and fragile emotion. He is excellent again in this true-life tale of redemption in the eponymous New York prison, even if his performance is at a different pitch from those of the nonprofessionals around him. It’s not that he’s too big. It’s not that he’s not real enough. It’s just that he has no way of dialling down his natural magnetism. There are worse problems to have.
Domingo appears as John “Divine G” Whitfield, an inmate, apparently convicted unjustly, who runs a theatre programme based on the Rehabilitation Through the Arts scheme. The real Divine G, who has a cameo, was a vital force on that programme, edging inmates towards the theatre and writing imaginative plays for them to perform. Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin plays himself, a prisoner whom Whitfield spotted as a potential collaborator. As you might expect in a prison drama, the mentor edges his new discovery away from potentially violent subcultures and towards a class of salvation. At the same time, Whitfield is worrying about an increasingly frustrating effort to secure parole. He uses theatre as a way of filtering the disappointments caused by bureaucratic inflexibility.
Sing Sing is a playful name for an often playful film. It would be a little too playful if they were staging a full-on musical, but the merging of performance with the name of the prison in Ossining, New York (where Don and Betty Draper lived at the start of Mad Men), is a nice effect. One could also argue that it chimes with the film’s surprisingly benign portrayal of life in that correctional facility. We get a sense that these men are under constant psychological stress. We see how their tiny cells are decorated with just enough personal touches to create a dilute version of home. But you see little of the brutality you get in Scum, Cool Hand Luke or even the tougher moments of The Shawshank Redemption.
That’s fair enough. The film’s director, Greg Kwedar, who wrote the screenplay with Clint Bentley, is more concerned with what goes on in the rehearsal room than what happens in the prison yard. The looseness of the scenes – a hint of workshopping – breaks the drama out of redemptive cliches. There is, on a moment-by-moment basis, a convincing re-creation of real life lived in a pressure-cooker atmosphere. More cynical viewers may roll their eyes at the inclinations towards self-help, but the actors are rooted enough to make you believe.
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It helps that Kwedar allowed those performers to stretch beyond the action on screen. Shooting on film, he would, if the 10-minute magazine ran out during an intense interaction, allow the actors to play to a close. “There would be times where someone was in the middle of something that was clearly bigger than anything we were doing on set,” he has explained. That is what happens when so many actors have a personal attachment to the material.
It would be hard to argue that Sing Sing makes a case for the production we see emerging. Brent (the professional actor Paul Raci), the director, helps to devise an apparently bananas comedy that has something to do with pirates, Roman warriors and ancient Egypt. One senses the dramaturgy is driven more by therapeutic concerns than by the principles of Peter Brook. In contrast, Sing Sing itself does us all good while delivering a compendium of engaging personal dramas. Domingo rules over all like the most benign of creative deities. A second Oscar nomination surely looms.
Sing Sing is in cinemas from Friday, August 30th
