The Hurricane

Year 2000 Trademarks:

• Pre-Tony Scott Denzel Washington
• Presence of K-Ci and JoJo (of “All My Life” fame) on soundtrack
• Leiv Schriber

What’s it like 10 years later?

In a way the movie feels more timely now than it probably did back in 2000. Today’s audiences, having experienced John Q and The Great Debaters, feel right at home in a mediocre Denzel Washington film. But place yourself at the dawn of the new millennium: Denzel was riding high off a ’90s of wildly successful John Grisham adaptations and Tom Hanks terminal-illness tearjerkers. The man could do no wrong. Sure, there was a dud or two (Fallen, The Bone Collector), but those tended to be low-key genre pictures — most of which found homes on afternoon TNT lineups anyway. For the most part, Denzel Washington was the black dude all of America could agree on back when Obama was dealing with county clerks somewhere in Illinois.

The Hurricane changed all that. The film, based on the real-life story of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, tells the tale of a rising middleweight boxer in the 1950s wrongfully accused of murder by a police captain so ruthlessly evil only Dan Hedaya could play him, and spends 15 years in prison. Behind bars, Carter goes into typical Zen inmate mode, familiar to anyone who’s seen Malcom X (or the opening credits of Con Air). He reads. He mediates. He becomes a “poet warrior” (his words). He also writes an autobiography, which is bought years later at a book fair by Lesra, a teenage black boy from Brooklyn but living in Canada (more on that in a moment). Lesra is inspired by Carter’s story and begins a long legal battle to free Carter, recruiting Leiv Schriber and the two other white people he lives with in Toronto.

This last detail is perhaps the most perplexing part of The Hurricane. We never really learn much about these miraculous Canucks (including Deborah Unger and John Hannah, star of Sliding Doors, which one of the best romantic comedies of the late ’90s, and The Mummy, which was not), other than they live together in some kind of non-sexual arrangement, they worked for the EPA, and they possess brilliant investigative skills despite having absolutely no training as detectives or lawyers. Basically they’re the Planeteers.

The Hurricane wasn’t technically a “flop” when it landed in theaters (despite this abundance of Canadians). But it was the first big piece of Denzel Washington Oscar bait audiences didn’t go head over heels for. Sure, the man got his Academy and Golden Globe nods. He was playing a real-life sports hero unjustly imprisoned for 30 years. Ted Kazinski could’ve landed the part and gotten a Teen Choice Award out of it. But (a) the film’s lack of any other nominations, (b) its lukewarm reception, and (c) accusations against the film’s accuracy all indicated that America’s honeymoon with Washington tearjerkers was drawing to a close. After successfully wooing us with heartbreaking (though ultimately uplifting) tales of slavery (Glory), sexism (Courage Under Fire) and the hardships of being stalked by John Lithgow (Ricochet) we were growing tired of being taught what horrible people the rest of us were by a man with a salary big enough to buy the towns most of lived in.

This is exactly what The Hurricane’s like, meaningful critique of our justice system was all about, dude. Which brings me to the most overwhelming way in which the movie does feel 10 years old: its lack of a moral grey area. Now, I’m not going to sit here and spit out pretentious terms like “post-9/11” and “Bush era” like I don’t completely ignore the New York Times site I naively set as my home page and click straight to YouTube, but you don’t have to be Henry Kissenger to see the difference between more recent (and yes, mostly after 2001) “message” movies like Syriana, Babel, Crash and Traffic (not to mention HBO’s The Wire), in which every side gets due consideration and even the most despicable politician has his motivations, and a movie like The Hurricane in which the good guys have wings and everyone else might as well wear SS uniforms. After Carter and Lesra, in fact, there are only three decent people in the movie, and they’re Canadian so it doesn’t really count.

Nowhere in The Hurricane is this schmatziness more apparent than in the courtroom, where Carter tearfully tells his cynical (non-Canadian!) lawyers, “We transcend the law! We get back to humanity!” Corny? Perhaps. But no less corny than Washington’s adorable courtroom antics in the universally loved Philadelphia. But that was 1993. Beverly Hills 90210 was one of the most popular shows on TV: Our tolerance for corn was at an all-time high. Compare that with recent years, when even kids’ films like Up and Where the Wild Things Are are best watched with a bottle of Xanax in hand. It’s no coincidence that Denzel, who failed to get an Oscar playing the upstanding “poet warrior” in The Hurricane, would win one a year later in Training Day playing a corrupt, drug-dealing cop.