Blu-Ray Review: ‘Night Catches Us’ Illuminates Overlooked History

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CHICAGO – Nominated right alongside buzzed-about features such as “Get Low” and “Tiny Furniture” in the Best First Feature category at this year’s Indie Spirit Awards is “Night Catches Us,” the impressive yet entirely overlooked filmmaking debut of writer/producer/director Tanya Hamilton. The film breaks no new ground artistically, but its historical backdrop has rarely been explored in cinema.

Welcome to Philadelphia, 1976. The rumblings of revolution during the 1960s have faded into the distance, but their remnants are scattered all over the volatile neighborhood occupied by Patricia (Kerry Washington). She’s a single mom resigned to shutting out the past while still remaining entrapped by it. Patricia’s caginess causes her ever-curious daughter, Iris (Jamara Griffin), to resort to drastic measures, literally ripping apart the wallpaper in an effort to unearth her family’s blood-stained secrets (this is an example of the film’s less than subtle visual metaphors).

Blu-Ray Rating: 3.5/5.0

Into this haunted environment wanders a ghost from the past, Marcus (the magnetic Anthony Mackie), returning home after a four year hiatus. Many people in town aren’t pleased to see him back. Some accuse him of being the “snitch” that led the Feds to gun down a fellow Black Panther member. The venomous prejudice of white police officers barely seems to have changed by the mid-70s, and their racial slurs cause angry youth like Jimmy (Amari Cheatom) to seek inspiration in the stories of the Panthers, which have already reached mythological proportions. Jimmy mistakes an anti-Panther propaganda comic (mysteriously kept by Marcus) as an illustration of the party’s championing of violence against the “pigs.” Yet it’s Iris who first stumbles upon the book, which only intensifies her need to piece together the fragments of her history that Patricia refuses to connect. The plot unfolds at a rather predictable rhythm, fusing formulaic archetypes with fresh and provocative subject matter.

Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington star in Tanya Hamilton’s Night Catches Us.
Photo credit: Magnolia Home Entertainment

The weakest element of the picture may be Hamilton’s script, which forces its characters to express themselves a tad too tidily. There isn’t a line Iris utters that doesn’t sound written. Yet as a director, Hamilton is skilled at eliciting uniformly powerful performances from her ensemble. After his exceptional supporting work in “Half Nelson” and “The Hurt Locker,” Mackie proves to be a leading man of limitless potential. Washington is equally strong in a tricky role, allowing her character’s repressed demons to glisten ever so subtly through a hardened exterior. And Cheatom is heartbreaking as a young screw-up who lashes out at the world using a language that he hasn’t fully comprehended. With its evocative score by The Roots, and moments of painterly beauty courtesy of cinematographer David Tumblety (“Requiem for a Dream”), the film is ultimately an intimate character drama designed to represent a sprawling and troubling period in our all-too-recent past.

Night Catches Us was released on Blu-Ray and DVD on Feb. 1, 2011. Photo credit: Magnolia Home Entertainment

“Night Catches Us” is presented in crisp 1080p High Definition (with a 1.85:1 aspect ratio), accompanied by English and Spanish audio tracks. The disc’s thirteen minutes of deleted scenes include alternate versions of key sequences with an additional amount of exposition, some of it unnecessary, some of it helpful in clarifying plot points and character dynamics. Marcus’s heated confrontation with Jimmy is mellower when moved to Patricia’s front porch. The vague explanation Marcus gives about his illustrated Panther propaganda in the final cut (“The feds printed these comics for people like you”) is changed to, “The comic was printed by the feds to make us look bad to the people who were helping us…I kept the comic to remind me that we’d never be remembered for anything good.” The line may be excessive, but it does assist in further illuminating the Panthers’ frequently misunderstood nature. There’s also an alternate ending featuring a line from Marcus that alters the film’s overarching tone, resulting in a more tragic, yet still relatively open-ended conclusion.

Other special features are more generic, such as a photo gallery, an inexplicable three-minute excerpt of behind-the-scenes footage, and a standard 5-minute HDNet featurette in which Hamilton’s screen time is disappointingly brief. The filmmaker admits that when Kathleen Cleaver, wife of the Black Panther Party’s minister of information, Eldridge Cleaver, saw the film, she told her that the comic was printed not by the feds but by a revolutionary separate from the party.

The obvious highlight of this disc is its extensive interviews (totaling 76 minutes) with Black Panther members Bobby Seale, Jamal Joseph and Emory Douglas, as well as singer William “Darondo” Pulliam. It’s great to see such thorough conservations with such fascinating subjects, though the disc neglects to bookend them with any historical context. Clumsily shot with a handheld camera, Seale discusses how he founded the party with Huey P. Newton, the ideals that built its foundation, and the metaphorical speeches that were often interpreted as violent battle cries. Joseph, a former party member turned filmmaker and educator, gives the best and least rambling interview by far. He recalls attending his first Panther meeting where he was said to receive the party’s “secret weapon.” Joseph was surprised when the speaker handed him a book rather than a gun, and told him that the Panthers were taking part in “a class struggle, not just a race struggle.”

By MATT FAGERHOLM Staff Writer HollywoodChicago.com matt@hollywoodchicago.com