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Film
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Civil Brand
Director Neema Barnette delivers a prison film that tries to break the mold and offer a unique expose of modern day correctional facilities.
Friday, August 29, 2003
By Todd Gilchrist
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What is it that makes prison films so appealing to filmmakers? Possibly the contained universe of archetypal characters who interact behind those gated walls. Or the camaraderie and conflict that erupts when men and/or women are locked away from their lives and given time to consider the repercussions of their actions or their place in society before, during, and after incarceration. So why then are so many of them so bad? Perhaps for the same reasons the environment possesses such cinematic potential: time and archetypes, and in far too frequently inadequate doses.
Civil Brand wants to be activism as art, a captivating and unique expose of correctional facilities, but it is unfortunately too contained by the shackles of formula to release even the most facile insight.
Starring LisaRaye, whose claim to fame thus far has been as the only dancer in Ice Cube’s strip club comedy The Player’s Club not to take off her clothes, Civil Brand probably once intended to show the indignities of institutional rehabilitation through the eyes of the prison’s newest (if not unlikeliest) inmate. The inhabitants of Whitehead Correctional Institute, however, look more like bored housewives than hardened criminals, and rather than getting prison tats and shanking one another in the shower, they toil in back-breaking couture clothing sweatshops presided over by the warden (Reed R. McCants) and his domineering minion Captain Deese (Clifton Powell). The film tenaciously targets the idea of prisons as industrial complexes, forgetting that punishment without rehabilitation means nothing (despite the fact that these women will emerge from their incarceration as at least semi-skilled laborers), and transforms the convicts into concentration camp martyrs without suggesting any alternate solutions for this growing problem the film purports to document.
Each convict’s backstory is filled with sufficient circumstantial evidence - sexual abuse, an errant but persuasive lover, etc. - to retain the audience’s sympathies, and obscure the likelier possibility of actual, unspoken misdeeds that may have landed any of these women (much less your typical jailhouse cat) in prison. Given their virtual carte blanche outside the sweatshops to wander about in their pajamas, fraternize with prison staff alike, and scuffle with fellow inmates without fear of reprisal, it’s small wonder they begin to feel that their conditions are less than humane - after all, it isn’t like they’re in jail or anything. The cast boasts a deep roster of familiar talent, including Raye, Lark Voorhies (that’s Saved By the Bell’s Lisa to you), Tichina Arnold (Big Momma’s House), Da Brat, MC Lyte, Powell (Dead Presidents), N’ Bushe Wright (Fresh) and Mos Def (slumming as a college-boy part-time guard whose liberal eyes are opened to the horrors of prison life). Unfortunately, they are expected (both individually and collectively) to fill, with nary a deviation, their respective positions as instigators, activists, innocents, or mediators, and Civil Brand loses the natural momentum its dramatic material not only requires, but could easily build upon if explored by a talent who possessed the creativity and determination to portray such characterizations with depth and sensitivity. Rather than complementing one another as an eclectic, superlative ensemble, the acting is ushered towards levels of melodrama only achieved by Cinemax style women-in-prison films but without the titillating shower scenes (which here would provide a welcome diversion).
Given the film’s polemical tone and ambitious scope, director Neema Barnette (yes, the same Neema Barnette who won an NAACP Image Award for her efforts on What’s Happening Now) was clearly moved by the material included in Joyce Renee Lewis’ script. The end result, however, is wildly uneven, rife with a virtual checklist of human tragedies (rape, abuse, murder) that build to easy emotional crescendos but fail to engage the audience well enough to evoke any meaning from them. The film’s mediocrity lies in its compulsive acquiescence to genre convention, those characters and storylines we expect to appear and disappear based on our experiences with similar movies, and its simultaneous insistence that the material is new and revealing. Once those familiar steel bars bear down on its characters, creativity and originality are restrained as surely as they are and Civil Brand becomes little more than a 91 minute sentence to be endured rather than entertained by.
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