A work of fiction that tackles a political issue can act like a fire alarm, creating a sense of urgency in the public, or it can disappear into the media landscape like a car alarm. Jeremy Saulnier’s new film, “Rebel Ridge,” now on Netflix, fits uneasily in between, like an alarm that turns itself off. The action drama about the widespread legitimization of police abuse of power arrives on the screen with a jolt but then sinks into a comfort zone of formulaic tropes. The film is set in a fictional small town in rural Louisiana called Shelby Springs, whose police force fills its coffers through civil seizures carried out by its officers wantonly and without legal justification. This ongoing endeavor has created a web of cruelty, fraud and corruption in which many unfortunate people find themselves caught.
One of these unfortunates is the film’s protagonist, Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre), a young black man who is cycling into town with a backpack on his back to post bail for a cousin. On a long and deserted country road, two policemen (played by Emory Cohen and David Denman) deliberately knock him off his bike with their car. Without officially arresting him, they arrest him and search him, using threats to force his consent. In his backpack they find a bag full of cash – $36,000, of which $10,000 is for bail and the rest is for buying a truck and setting up a boat transport business. Suspecting that the money is more likely part of a drug trafficking conspiracy, they confiscate the money and send him away.
At first, Terry assumes that the officers are black sheep who will be punished if he reports the incident to their superiors as a robbery. No chance: Police Chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson) gives him dire warnings to drop the matter, and even when he makes a seeming gesture of understanding and generosity, it turns out to be a cold and cruel deception. Meanwhile, Terry’s cousin Mike Simmons (CJ LeBlanc) is running out of time as he faces transfer from the local jail to a state prison. As the department’s official misdeeds spread and also harm others around Terry (including a former business partner), the drama escalates.
But Terry is not alone. When the town’s apathetic clerk (Steve Zissis) offers him no help, a young court assistant named Summer McBride (AnnaSophia Robb), a personable but cautious law student who knows exactly how closely she is being watched by suspicious superiors, guides him through a labyrinth of corruption. She secretly searches through files and uncovers a dubious pattern of apparent collusion between the police and the local court, involving questionable arrests and incarceration. Realizing that legal action is futile, Terry – a Marine veteran and martial arts expert – becomes a kinetic resister.
It would be wrong to go into the plot in any detail. Suffice it to say that Terry boldly enters physical confrontations with a force that far outnumbers and outguns him; that the officers do everything they can to get Terry far away and keep him quiet; and that those who assist Terry in his quest face alarming reprisals. Nor is it a spoiler to say that the film examines the racism underlying Terry’s persecution. However vicious the members of the police department may be, their racism remains largely implicit, if unmistakable. But one telling moment voices what otherwise goes unspoken – a repulsive reminder of the violence of Jim Crow laws, addressed to Terry within earshot of the department’s only non-white officer, a black woman named Jessica Sims (Zsané Jhé).
Saulnier’s script suggests that he has thoroughly researched the intricacies of police procedure, legal and illegal, as well as the finer points of justice and hand-to-hand combat (including details of firearms and ammunition). But in order to advance the action and condense the plot points, the dialogue is rarely more than matter-of-fact, and characterizations that go beyond the bare necessities of the plot are filled in mainly by the personalities and idiosyncrasies of the actors playing the roles. The film’s attempt to mix a backstory of government depravity with daring adventure – capped by the heroic resistance (predestined to succeed) of a victim of racist persecution – amounts to a satisfyingly plotted thriller full of well-established but superficial pleasures.
The great danger of the genre is that it provides a ready-made excuse for all the shortcuts taken to satisfy its conventions. Once the film’s many sequences of tense showdowns and looming danger are built up, the main tension is technical: whether the characters can follow through with their plans and save themselves from danger. “Rebel Ridge” has the framework of a richly developed drama about local corruption – a film that would speak to the region’s deep history, reflect contemporary politics and capture the connections to modern American life in general. Instead, the essence of the film is reduced to an elaborate wind-up toy, a mechanism that is all spectacle.
Still, Saulnier’s approach to this spectacle is anything but routine. Aside from a few snippets of dialogue that convey important information or emotional moments and sudden bursts of violence, “Rebel Ridge” is surprisingly slow-paced. For most of the film’s two-plus hours, viewers would barely miss a thing if they were watching out of the corner of their eyes until something – a sound, a silence, a movement – prompts them to pay attention. In a movie theater, such an expansive narrative would likely be boring and feel like a time-waster. Still, Saulnier is a step ahead of the competition when it comes to creating a consumer product that is meant to be viewed with some degree of distraction: He develops its necessity into an aesthetic.
The gradual pace of “Rebel Ridge” is complemented by a performance style of classical, sculptural solidity. As in Hollywood films of the high-studio era, the actors in Saulnier’s film speak without moving; they face each other in tensely controlled silence, flaunting their dynamic immobility and speaking with a terse, drawn-out and hushed precision to match. As a result, the behavior, slowed to a literal and spoon-fed crawl, also seems exaggerated and stylized. This unusually restrained aspect of the performance gives the actors a more distinctive stage than the overt theatricality of most films. The martial arts and athletic energy that most of the performers must employ are far less significant, impressive and crucial to the film’s overall impact than the tautly pressing restraint with which they face each other. The film’s frantically choreographed violence has less power than the characters’ subtle but precise glances of recognition, hostility, or complicity. The film’s physicality is infinitesimal in its most vital form. ♦
