This use of non-professional actors lends Sing Sing an immediacy that units it other than most inspirational jail motion pictures. A lesser movie would make Divine G as an inspirational determine whose love for theater melts the resistance of Divine Eye, a testomony to the ability of artwork to melt even essentially the most hardened prison. That’s not what Sing Sing is although.
By centering the experiences of actual males who’ve actually been incarcerated, Kwedar and Bentley’s script by no means lets them change into such easy tropes. These are difficult males who know firsthand the failures of the American justice system. Regardless of what the Rehabilitation By means of the Arts program calls itself, these males will not be “rehabilitated” by the humanities, as a result of they require no rehabilitation. Reasonably the humanities assist the boys maintain onto the humanity the jail system tries to erode.
It’s a posh story for the film to inform, one which wants an unbelievable actor to tug it off. That’s precisely what Domingo offers.
Doing the Most By Doing the Least
Early in Sing Sing, Divine G leads a gathering of the jail’s RTA committee, a bunch of 5 inmates sitting in a circle. They’ve gathered to debate the following batch of potential candidates, and every of the boys has an outsized response to the candidates. They wave their arms, crack jokes, and bounce off one another as they share their ideas. G sits within the middle, making an attempt to push his mates for extra particular solutions for every of the candidates.
Kwedar and his cinematographer Pat Scola shoot the primary a part of the assembly as a oner, the digital camera doing a gradual push in on G, an uncommon cinematic selection. Why use such a bravado transfer for one thing as mundane as a gathering? Why focus growing consideration on essentially the most nonetheless and silent of the boys, as a substitute of keying in on the energetic folks round him?
The plain reply is that the composition and digital camera actions talk to us viewers the significance that G places on the RTA. It’s the factor that retains him alive within the jail. At first look, G’s reactions betray slight contempt for his fellow inmates, irritation that they don’t take this as severely as him. Nevertheless, the push in forces us to look nearer, to see the whole lot that Domingo does within the scene. When G asks Mike Mike, his closest buddy within the group, to provide “the lengthy reply” after getting a dismissive brief reply, Domingo leans barely towards his castmate and smiles. He shows the person’s real affection for Mike Mike, which helps him stifle his annoyance.
