“Exploding across the stressed out summer of 2017 like a powder keg thrown into a room that’s already on fire, Kathryn Bigelow’s hectic but harrowing docudrama account of the 1967 Detroit riots is inevitably as concerned with the persistence of systemic racism as it is with its past,” begins David Ehrlich at IndieWire. He finds “there’s something broadly instructive about a major director choosing this moment to make a movie about this episode in the fraught history of American race relations. With Ferguson still so close in the rearview mirror, with Eric Garner still so fresh in so many minds, not even the whitest of viewers (or filmmakers) can look at Detroit and pretend that we ever really left. Detroit is extremely powerful when its wandering eye is trained on the moment at hand, when it’s performing a bracingly direct meditation on white violence and black fear. The film only runs into trouble when it clumsily attempts to contextualize the events of its horrific second act, as Bigelow and her Zero Dark Thirty screenwriter Mark Boal struggle to frame a tragic incident that was shaped by centuries of context.”
Variety’s Owen Gleiberman wants us to know that “this is no comforting drama of social protest. It’s closer to a hair-trigger historical nightmare, one you can’t tear yourself away from. Bigelow . . . has created a turbulent, live-wire panorama of race in America that feels like it’s all unfolding in the moment, and that’s its power. We’re not watching tidy, well-meaning lessons—we’re watching people driven, by an impossible situation, to act out who they really are.”
“An uprising that lasted five days is too big a subject even for a 2½ hour film,” writes Matt Prigge for Metro US. “So Bigelow/Boal focus on one of the more horrific stories buried under the rubble: the so-called ‘Algiers Motel Incident.’ On the third day, twelve civilians—ten black, two white—were tortured, physically and mentally, by white cops who suspected one of them of firing sniper shots at the National Guard from the window of the run-down motel. There was no sniper . . . The ‘incident,’ which eats up about an hour of the middle, may be the greatest thing [Bigelow’s] ever made.”
Screen’s Tim Grierson: “Bigelow immerses us in the action almost immediately, as Barry Ackroyd’s jittery camerawork captures the bedlam and danger of a full-scale riot from an intimate, street-level perspective. The combination of an aggrieved, enraged black population and a well-armed, hostile white police force is a recipe for disaster, and Detroit makes viewers feel the heat of the flames and the fury of the participants.”
The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy will grant that Detroit is “intense and physically powerful in the way it conveys its atrocious events,” but “the film nonetheless remains short on complexity, as if it were enough simply to provoke and outrage the audience. It's a grim tale with no catharsis.”
Mike Ryan at Uproxx: “Bigelow has a knack for building tension to an impossible level where an audience member is looking for any sort of relief—think of the scenes involving bomb diffusion in The Hurt Locker, or the scene of trailing Bin Laden’s courier in Zero Dark Thirty. . . . But with Detroit, once the horrors of that night have ended, the repercussions are far from over. And Detroit is both very aware of this and also doesn’t quite know what to do with itself once it ends the documentation of that terrible night. This is not a movie with a tidy ending. And probably rightfully so.”
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“Of course, whether a white director and a white writer are the people who should be telling this story at all is a matter of debate, especially at a time when the struggle for representation on- and off-screen has become one of the film industry’s most pressing issues,” writes Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson. “So Detroit comes laden with a set of built-in problems—perhaps even red flags. But nonetheless, Detroit is such a gripping and ultimately shattering piece of cinema that it merits seeing—albeit with a skeptical eye.”
“Detroit is an impeccably-rendered and pivotal battle in a much longer, shattering war,” writes Claudia Puig at TheWrap.
From Mark Boal’s piece for Vulture, “Why I Wrote Detroit”:
I chose this story from the ’60s in part because the decade evokes such lively and contradictory associations. The summer of 1967 witnessed two of the worst civil disturbances in American history—first Newark, then Detroit. It is troubling even now to watch the news coverage of all that violence and destruction, but make no mistake about it—this was an uprising, a rebellion. This was black America lashing out against an entrenched culture of repression and bigotry. And yet the far more widely remembered (and celebrated) spectacle of rebellion from that same moment in time is of the Summer of Love, all those hippies, mostly white, joyfully grooving out in San Francisco. By now, the love-potion stuff has run its course, diffused into little more than an advertising trope, but the events in Detroit are hard evidence of a cultural crisis that remains unresolved, of two Americas that still don’t know quite how to deal with each other.
Michel Martin interviews Bigelow for NPR. Meantime, the TIFF Cinematheque series Kathryn Bigelow: On the Edge is on in Toronto through August 15. And on the latest episode of The Cinephiliacs, Manohla Dargis talks a bit about championing Bigelow in a 2009 profile for the New York Times.
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