Director: Elegance Bratton
Writer: Elegance Bratton
Stars: Jeremy Pope, Gabrielle Union, Bokeem Woodbine
Strong performances and some clever reflections between homoeroticism and military-encouraged hypermasculinity elevate an often formulaic drama.
Writer-director Elegance Bratton makes a promising and passionate narrative debut with The Inspection, a film loosely inspired by his own story as a gay man joining the army, a harsh and self-flagellating process for someone who had only experienced his sexuality as a punishment.
His previous film, the documentary Pier Kids about three homeless LGBTQ+ youth in Manhattan, had already intersected with his own experience as someone who was also queer and homeless, but here he focuses more sharply, turning Ellis (star of theater Jeremy Pope) in a double for himself at age 25, rejected by his cruel and religious mother (Gabrielle Union) and living in a shelter in New Jersey. It's 2005 and driven by the need to feel like his life matters, he follows wall-to-wall news coverage of the war on terror to the Marine Corps, an act of desperation he hopes will save him.
It was a time when "don't ask, don't tell" was still in operation and Ellis, now known by his French surname to those around him, was forcing himself back into the closet to survive and he's in that gap. between what he wants to be and what he wants to be seen as the film finds its rhythm.
The recently released trailer promised some pretty obvious cliffhanger, but Bratton's film is mostly more sensitive than marketers would like you to think. It is a light film about great moments and great speeches, more interested in the difficulty of everyday life, how a queer man navigates a world of aggressive and puffed-up masculinity when his need to be hugged may be greater than his need to be accepted. .
It's in the film's rarer moments when things feel more inventive, narratively and visually, that Bratton most firmly departs from the army drama formula and finds ways to make his film sit and thrive on the plot. of Venn between military machismo and homoeroticism. The physical intimacy, the sweaty overexertion, how it can all seem as one, the thrilling touch far from sexual and the danger within that closeness, how your mind or body can misunderstand anything. Purple lighting and a pulsing score suddenly turn the barracks into a gay club and in one daring scene, Ellis's shower fantasy cruelly intersects with reality and he finds himself erect, surrounded by the other men. He brings things crashing down early, quickly painting Ellis as an outcast, an experience he's all too used to, but Bratton doesn't drown us in the misery of it, flashes of humor and sexiness keeping his movie light, if not exactly. light.
Pope's performance is also key in this, the bizarre nature of her and how he chooses to handle or hide her in a situation like this, adding an extra level of texture to a story that already comes from lived experience. I don't believe in the rigor that some impose when it comes to the rule that only queer actors play queer people, but Pope's delicate and skillful work here is an example of why mirroring can work so perfectly sometimes. . The little hidden bits of him, when he allows himself to just be, without the self-censorship of the survivors, are both funny and sad, and it's a movie that should propel him into the bigger leagues with ease. The prewritten version of Union deglamming and knuckling down was that this would be his last Oscar run, a narrative that works better on paper than on screen. She's good, especially in her first scene, exerting a searing sternness that some actors would avoid or exaggerate, but there's too little screen time, to Bratton's credit, for her to fit the pipe dream.
There are successful growls from an ever-reliable Bokeem Woodbine as Ellis's cruel general and hard-to-pinpoint cuteness from Raúl Castillo as his good-for-evil cop, but they exist mainly in the installments that turn out to be much less compelling. Bratton can't help but fall into a tired military convention and there's too much here that we've seen too many times before, with little to distinguish. The breakdown of a young man, the interpersonal conflicts of man to man with others, the savagery of military life, it is a story with which we are all too, perhaps boringly, familiar.
Like the version we see of the younger self of him, Bratton's film is also caught between these two worlds, one more curious and creative, the other clichéd and constructed.
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