Night Catches Us

City Paper Grade: B

by Sam Adams

RADICAL ROOTS: In Philadelphia director Tanya Hamilton's debut, former Black Panther Patricia (Kerry Washington) chooses to work within the system, not against it.

[CITY PAPER GRADE: B ]

In Tanya Hamilton's debut feature, former Black Panthers Marcus (Anthony Mackie) and Patricia (Kerry Washington) navigate the pitfalls of a post-radical life. It's 1976 in Germantown, and hope is on the horizon. Jimmy Carter's speeches drift from car radios into the streets, and the lynchings and church bombings of the civil rights struggle are a fading memory. But for Washington, the wounds of the past are as close as the bullet holes under her kitchen wallpaper. Her Panther husband was shot dead where she and her daughter now eat breakfast, in return for the murder of a police officer. The Panthers have petered out, but their militant rhetoric remains, lying around like unexploded ordnance. Neighborhood boy Jimmy Dixon (Amari Cheatom), one of many strays Washington keeps under her wing, is too young to remember that the rifles and race-war slogans were window dressing for an organization preoccupied with meat-and-potatoes community activism. To him, picking up a gun is the only satisfying response to the daily harassment of the city's police force. Rizzo-era racial tension is omnipresent if never explicitly invoked, contributing to the sense that violence is only one wrong move away. Patricia has suppressed her radical leanings and now works within the system as a civil rights attorney, but Marcus chose self-imposed exile, prompted by rumors that he snitched to the cops. His father's funeral brings him back, but unfinished business makes him linger, not least his half-submerged romance with Patricia. Here, Hamilton drifts dangerously close to formula, and risks reducing her genuinely fascinating subject to a backdrop. But Mackie and Washington are too fine to let stock situations overtake them. It's clear Hamilton wants to reach beyond the art house, to people who've experienced stories like hers firsthand. Even undeclared wars have their casualties, and the scars don't always show.