By Sandra Hall
SINNERS
★★★
CTC, 137 minutes. In cinemas Thursday, April 17
African-American writer-director Ryan Coogler has given Marvel its biggest hits of recent years with his Black Panther movies but he’s taking a risk with this one – an excursion into the deepest reaches of Southern Gothic accompanied by blues music and a lot of interference from the supernatural.
Michael B. Jordan and Michael B. Jordan (playing identical twins) and Omar Benson Miller (right) in Sinners.Credit: AP
We’re in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, and racial bigotry still rules but in the town of Clarksdale, the local community of black sharecroppers is shaking off its troubles by taking in the pleasures of the fast-growing blues music scene.
This is where Michael Jordan, a regular Coogler collaborator comes in – cast in a double role as the Smokestack brothers, identical twins who call themselves Smoke and Stack. Born in Clarksdale, they left home to serve in World War I and moved on to Chicago just as its Prohibition-era gang wars were erupting. Now they’re back, wearing sharp suits, displaying an impressive degree of attitude and bringing a supply of bootleg booze to start a juke joint showcasing the blues.
They have bought an old sawmill to house their speakeasy and they’re determined to stage their opening night party within hours of their arrival. The local Chinese-American grocery is doing the catering and every blues player in the neighbourhood is being hired to perform.
And so far so good. The score’s composer, Ludwig Göranssen, did a lot of research into the blues and its beginnings, touring the South’s blues museums before he sat down to write, and Coogler spent time educating himself about the history of African-American culture and how it was shaped by rituals and beliefs imported from Africa. And for the film’s first half, all this care shows in what you hear and see on screen. It’s shameless melodrama but done with a lively intelligence and a lot of zest.
Jordan’s performance is infused with verve and variety enough to allay your confusion and help you distinguish one brother from the other, and the dialogue is salty and sardonic. The plot also takes on a few promising twists as the brothers reconnect with the women they left behind. Smoke has always loved Annie (Nigerian-born British actress Wunmi Mosaku), a healer with a lot of faith in folk magic, while Stack is nobly doing his best to resist the overtures of his childhood sweetheart, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), whose mixed parentage allows her to pass as white, although she doesn’t want to.
The music, too, is terrific, rising to a crescendo with a song by the preacher’s son, Sammie (Miles Caton), a guitar virtuoso whose playing is exciting enough to wake a ghost – which is the cue for Coogler’s teenage passion for horror movies to kick in. All hell breaks loose – at least that part of it populated by the living dead – and a smart film is rapidly transformed into a semi-comic bloodfest, its effect magnified by Cooglar’s decision to shoot with IMAX cameras.
The villain is an Irish vampire. A fan of the Irish folk song, he performs a straight-legged Irish jig at one stage, looking like a vampiric Michael Flatley. But Sammie’s performance has won him over to the blues and he wants to sink his teeth into him so that they can spend their immortality jamming together.
The absurdities which result are intermittently entertaining, but the film’s first half has put us on the road to something much more involving, and I spent the rest of it wondering what might have been.
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