Let’s start with this again: This is one of those situations where I need to remind myself and anyone reading this that I am indeed white cishet male born and living in Finland with decent income and a good education. I do not want to try to push my point of view over that of any minority regarding any topic that affects them. Gladly, I did find a black voice that does uphold my views and, obviously, is more nuanced than what I have to say about that specifically. You can find that here: One Fetish After Another by Brooke Obie.

But to set this up, I guess I need to explain the movie. Spoilers ahead.

Ghetto Pat is a guy who has joined a terroristic revolutionary movement, because he likes black women. It’s obvious that while he has skills that have value for the movement, he is and always remains an outsider. He is a tourist in the world of revolution, never really trusted or let in the inner circle, even if he hovers around it. So, he has a child with Perfidia, the leader of the movement (or one of the leaders, we kind of learn about the organization, but it’s complicated). That leader isn’t really into family life, but Pat, being that tourist, wants to settle. When Perfidia is caught after a botched bank robbery, she rats on everyone around her before disappearing. Pat takes his child and goes into hiding. However, the army officer who brought Perfidia in, is also in love with her, and is in the process of joining a conspiracy of sorts, so he needs to make sure the child is not his, which leads him to basically start a civil war just to check on this, which leads to Pat, now known as Bob Ferguson, to get his shit together and find his daughter.

There’s certainly aspects to the movie that are appealing. First, the idea of a revolution is something that is probably being discussed in many circles currently. You know how the world is. However, this is not a blueprint for that. At one point “Bob” is watching The Battle for Algiers, which is about a real revolution in Algeria, and discusses real tactics and outcomes. Here, the outcomes don’t matter. Very early in the movie, our revolutionary movement, the French 75, free a couple of hundred immigrants from custody. The movie is very much interested in the spectacle of this, but not the real effects. What happened to these people? Who cares. This isn’t about them.

Second, there are interesting revolutionary characters here. In a way, the movie gets it right. The white man is there for the ride, while he lets others take the risks.

This means that the other characters are pretty two-dimensional, or even one-dimensional. Perfidia is just a violet revolutionary. Why? Again, who cares. She just is that way. We get a bit of information on this from her family: She is from a long line of revolutionaries. It’s just that revolutionaries need to be organized and methodical, because they are fighting an asymmetric war. They don’t have the resources of their enemies, so they need to think things through. Here, they just do stuff. They try avoid casualties, which is good, but they do a lot of property damage. How is that helpful? What do they achieve by bombing an empty courthouse? Some cases will be moved to other courthouses and the taxpayer will pay the costs. So, nothing. In reality, as the linked above article tells you, black activists in the US were specifically against reckless tactics.

But the character isn’t there to be smart or effective. She’s there to be objectified by both “Bob” and Lockjaw, the officer after her. Even her daughter, who would definitely be a more interesting subject of a story than “Bob”, has a barely more important role as an excuse for “Bob” to get his shit together.

There’s a sequence of scenes which kind of makes me cringe. There’s a sequence of events, where Bob (I’m done with the quotation marks), is trying to get some information from a contact, but the contact won’t give it to him, because Bob doesn’t remember the correct codephrases. This ends with someone else coming in and basically bailing Bob out by asking him a personal question, because they used to know each other and the other man feels he can use this to verify that it is actually Bob. The fetishization (this might not be the correct way to write that, but live with it) of women of color raises it’s head again, but here’s the thing: The man tells the original contact that Bob is a legend who was a soldier in the resistance for years.

Okay, the movie doesn’t really support this. He was just a tool. He was someone who’s expertise they could use to make bombs, but he was more like an outside consultant than a member of the group. He also just dropped the whole thing quite fast after having a kid. While it is good that he took responsibility for her, there’s this feeling that he was more interested in slighting Perfidia than really doing the work.

Obie asserts that the movie is essentially about PTA’s (the director, who I haven’t mentioned thusfar) own inability to make a change. Bob is a self-insert who is stuck outside of the real movement. Yet, he is put into the limelight and not necessarily in a very interesting way, because everyone else outshines him. In that regard, he is almost like a Linklater character who stumbled upon this movie: just an quintessentially banal person put into an extraordinary situation of a PTA movie.

Although, I do have to say that I don’t generally like Leonardo DiCaprio as an actor and here I didn’t mind his performance. Mostly, he didn’t go overboard with his committing to specific over-the-top aspects of the character, and that works to the movies advantage.