American Son (2019)

Today, I'm staying home for my mom and dad.

This is a Netflix adaptation of the 2018 Broadway play of the same name. Not a filmed recording of the stage performance, or exactly a cinematic film adaptation of the play, but something just a little in between. It features the Broadway cast, what I’m guess is probably the complete script, and a near-self-contained setting, albeit on a realistic-looking film set instead of a stage one. Netflix has been getting into the Broadway-adaptation game lately, and I am here for it. Maybe not quite for this one, though.

It’s the middle of the night, and Kendra is waiting in a police station. When her son Jamal didn’t come home, she called the police and was informed that his car was involved in an “incident.” While waiting for both her (separated) husband and the lieutenant, who’s apparently the only one authorized to speak on the matter, to arrive, she desperately tries to wring whatever information she can from the rookie cop on night duty.

I was maybe a quarter of the way through this movie when I started to think, “I bet a white person wrote this,” and a Google search afterward confirmed that suspicion. That might be an ungenerous assumption to make. As I said last week in my review of the first volume of the Riri Williams version of Iron Man/Ironheart, being white doesn’t automatically negate a writer’s ability to write characters of other races. I myself am a white writer, and this is a subject I’ve considered quite a bit. However, white writers creating characters of color need to be very careful/thoughtful, and that’s especially true when writing a story that’s very explicitly about race.

This play, steeped in the pressure cooker of a small number of characters stuck in a Miami police station in the middle of the night during an extremely-emotional situation, is all about race. It’s 90 minutes of distraught parents and evasive law-enforcement officers talking about profiling, inter-racial relationships, Black Live Matter, white spaces and Black spaces, and beyond. And while there are some admittedly-powerful moments here (the casual bias of Officer Larkin asking Kendra is Jamal has any “street names”; Kendra admitting that she wakes up in the middle of the night every night, envisioning Jamal getting pulled over,) it’s in amonst a lot of overwrought talking points that don’t come together with a particularly-clear message.

In short, I wanted to like it more than I did. I’m interested in the subject matter and the cast is uniformly good (more on them in a minute,) but for me, it stumbles in the execution. Watching it, I thought back to some of the pieces Trevor Noah has done on Black people and policing, such as a recent “Between-the-Scenes” segment discussing Stop-and-Frisk and different pieces he’s done on police shootings, especially one of the pieces he did on the Philando Castile shooting. Within the context of a comedy show, he’s given much more nuanced insight into these types of issues than this Broadway-play-turned-Netflix-movie did, and that’s important.

Back to the cast. Again, all the acting is strong. Kerry Washington plays Kendra as a desperate mother performing the herculean task of trying to hold herself together at the seams. Stephen Pasquale (who I’ll always remember best as Robbie from A Man of No Importance) plays her husband Scott, impressively wringing what truth he can from a rather confoundingly-written character. Jeremy Jordan (of equal parts Newsies and Supergirl fame) is effective as Officer Larkin, the young cop ham-fistedly trying to deal with all this at 4:00 in the morning, and the cast is rounded out by Eugene Lee as Lt. Stokes, the long-awaited authority figure who’s only slightly more punctual than Godot.

Warnings

Thematic elements, language (including racial slurs,) references to violence (and a brief scene of violence,) and sexual references.