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Follow those simple instructions and, voila! Director Norman Jewison (The Thomas Crown Affair, Moonstruck) provides cookie cutter vindication for Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the welterweight boxing champion from Paterson, N.J., who spent nearly two decades in prison for the 1966 murder of three bar patrons in that city's Lafayette Grill. Although Mr. Carter and his friend John Artis were eventually exonerated, with this Hollywoodisation it appears that the justice of a complete and objective chronicle remains an elusive commodity. The only certain thing in The Hurricane is an exceptionally fine title role performance by Denzel Washington.
However well intentioned, the director's sentimental treatment provides a disservice to all those concerned. Pumped up with dramatic indignation, the screenplay by Armyan Bernstein and Dan Gordon (based on Mr. Carter's The 16th Round and Lazarus and the Hurricane by Sam Chaiton and Terry Swinton) takes broad literary license. Replete with an Italian-American version of Inspector Javert (Dan Hedaya as Detective Vincent Della Pesca) obsessively devoting his entire life to keep the prize-fighter behind bars, The Hurricane plays like an American ghetto version of Les Miserables.
The humanitarian in you wants so much to take the David and Goliath tale on face value and thus celebrate Mr. Carter's ultimate triumph against bigotry, but there's a gnawing feeling that there's more to this story than we're being told. While fictionalisation in the name of artistic effect is an acceptable necessity in most biopics, too often in Mr. Jewison's flashback, flash-forward narrative, shadows of uncertainty fill the spaces between concrete facts. You can't help but wonder: Why can't the whole thing be finally told? If the pugilist was indeed framed, is it possible his persecutors were also involved in some other skulduggery? Perhaps there's another wrinkle to this, something politically far-reaching and even more heinous than racial hatred.
Oddly enough, though, the boxer's deliverance is directly linked to a series of true circumstances; a bona fide long shot that is indeed stranger than fiction. Lesra (Vicellous Reon Shannon), a black teenager from Brooklyn, is befriended by three Canadians who, having gained his parents' permission, whisk him up to Toronto for the purpose of receiving a proper education. His big wish is to attend college, even though he's illiterate. But his self-appointed teachers resolve that soon enough. And when he's ready for his first major read, Lesra purchases a tome at a book sale for 25 cents. It is Rubin Hurricane Carter's The 16th Round, a work he penned in prison. Now it serves like a note in a bottle from a shipwrecked sailor. Hurricane's message of transcending one's circumstances speaks to the hopeful youth. He is moved like never before. "Sometimes books pick us," notes one of Lesra's guardians.
The transplanted Brooklynite, portrayed well enough by Vicellous Reon Shannon, writes to his incarcerated idol and a touching pen pal relationship ensues. Then the teenager visits the fighter in prison. And soon thereafter he begins to champion Carter's innocence, eventually convincing the Canadians to go the full crusade route to overturn the Hurricane's conviction.
Lisa, Sam, and Terry, played with no special verve by Deborah Unger, Liev Schreiber and John Hannah, respectively, roll up their legal sleeves and begin their work. Finding new evidence, they set about to prove that Carter was a victim of racial prejudice. The rest is history, with the final scene predictably taking place in a courtroom. The closing credits inform that the real killers were never found.
Imbuing the film with its greatest power, Denzel Washington ingeniously takes his character from youthful paratrooper to champion boxer to ageing convict with notable aplomb. Making like Lon Chaney, Sr., he does the makeup folks proud, and adeptly matches each different era's Rubin Hurricane Carter with a corresponding attitude. Problem is, save for young Mr. Shannon, there really isn't anyone to act with. Mr. Hedaya's zealot cop is a caricature at best, the nondescript Canadians are about as complicated as Danish furniture, and everyone else in the cast is barely one step up from being scenery.
But back to those Canadians for a bit. Did they know something (or someone) besides the facts? In the movie these latter day Peaceniks describe themselves as being in the house rehabilitation business, but we have to figure them for much more than that when tthey overturn one of the most ironclad legal decisions in recent memory. Consider that previously a veritable stable of high profile stars made Hurricane their cause celebre. He became a symbol of racial prejudice. Kent State, Woodstock, Vietnam and Rubin Hurricane Carter were commonly mentioned in the same breath. Bob Dylan even wrote an anthem for the cause. Not a terribly great song, but a rousingly effective call to action all the same, it has since come to be synonymous with the socially conscious times.
Yet the best that all the king's horses and all the king's men could do was win Carter a second state trial, but not an acquittal. And now, lo and behold, these unknown house builders part the Red Sea. Witnessing the legal miracle wrought in Federal Court before Judge H. Lee Sorokin (Rod Steiger), the thought of replacing all our lawyers and judges with Canadian contractors is momentarily tempting.
Though some black-and-white neo-Raging Bull footage identifies the era and a passel of popular legalese is bandied about, The Hurricane is neither a boxing film nor a courtroom drama. Instead, it inadvertently comes across like a glossy apologia hyped by background music and a vastly compelling actor at its core. Mr. Jewison's cleanly edited thesis reminds of an elaborate geometry problem that a student has solved without showing the work. While we may concur with his conclusion, we can't give him a good grade until he explains how he arrived at the answeer. Though you can't disagree with The Hurricane's big budget diatribe against racial discrimination, one suspects we still haven't been taken to the real eye of this controversial storm.
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