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Mangrove (Steve McQueen, 2020)
🕑 Added 2020-09-30 02:55:20 +0000 UTC
Based on the rapturous reviews in the trades, we can probably expect to see Mangrove staking out some significant real estate in this year's admittedly-unorthodox Oscar race. That's fine; it's certainly well directed, and although it suffers from a script that functions squarely within Loach-Laverty territory, the uniformly excellent acting often comes close to putting it all across. Mangrove is basically ham-fisted agitprop designed to speak to our particular political moment, by demonstrating with a clinical ruthlessness that racial hatred and anti-immigrant sentiment are a seasonal virus that must be antiseptically destroyed over and over again.
In one sense, McQueen and co-writer Alastair Siddons are quite a bit smarter than the sort of folks who construct these sorts of prestige pictures Stateside. They're even a bit more theoretically oriented than Old Leftists like Loach and Laverty. An early scene takes place in a reading group in a private parlor, and a young activist Barbara (Rochenda Sandall) announces that they are in the home of "the great C.L.R. James." This feels forced, but then again, the entirety of Mangrove functions pedagogically, a bit like a dramatization of the Black Atlantic socialism of Stuart Hall that was beginning to become a force around the time of the Mangrove trial.
More specifically, the Mangrove Restaurant's owner, Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes), is a middle-class striver, an immigrant who does not want to overturn the system, but rather to buy in. He is an entrepreneur. As it happens, the Mangrove is not just a restaurant, but a point of community pride and identification, a safe space for Black Britons who feel displaced and unwanted elsewhere. And the racial hatred he faces from the London Police -- especially local Notting Hill constable Frank Pulley (Sam Spruell) -- turns Crichlow into a reluctant radical. In this regard, he is the textbook "organic intellectual" of Antonio Gramsci's political theory: a man whose essential being within the community makes him a de facto visionary leader.
All the same, Mangrove can become so plodding and schematic as to become wearying to actually watch. This might be different if it didn't so closely mirror the battles between Black activists and their allies, white supremacists, and racist-sympathizing cops, that are dominating the streets and newscasts night after night. It's difficult to know what to do with Mangrove. It is an important piece of history, and so becoming aware of it, and having it duly recorded, is certainly significant.
But is it galvanizing? I'm reminded of what Dave Chappelle remarked during his recent special 8:46, about the idea that he and other celebrities had the "responsibility" to speak up following the murder of George Floyd. "Who gives a fuck what Ja Rule has to say? The streets are talking."
