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With: Colman Domingo, Clarence Maclin, Sean San José, Paul Raci
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Written by: Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar
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Directed by: Greg Kwedar
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MPAA Rating: R for language throughout
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Running Time: 105
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Date: 07/12/2024
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Tuning into 'Sing Sing'
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
Soaring and tender, Greg Kwedar's extraordinary Sing Sing, a drama of incarcerated men, has empathy enough to embrace its achingly truthful, hardworking characters while rejecting the broken system that targets them.
Divine G (Colman Domingo) is incarcerated at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. He has found a purpose in the prison's RTA program, rehearsing and putting on plays for other incarcerated people. After wrapping A Midsummer Night's Dream, G, his best friend Mike Mike (Sean San José), and the rest of the RTA steering committee meet to discuss recruiting new talent. It's decided to approach "Divine Eye" (Clarence Maclin) about joining.
They meet with volunteer director Brent Buell (Paul Raci), to discuss what to perform next. G has written a play, but he feels it's not ready. The men suggest doing a comedy, and Brent volunteers to write something that includes all their ideas (cowboys, gladiators, time-travel, etc.). Divine Eye auditions for, and gets, the role of Hamlet, and will perform the famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy. But even as Divine Eye begins opening up, G finds himself tested in unexpected ways.
The thing that strikes most powerfully about Sing Sing is the quality of its acting. Most of the cast, aside from Domingo, San José, and Raci, are formerly incarcerated men who participated in the actual RTA program. With this, director Greg Kwedar encourages some of the most naturalistic acting ever filmed, so subtle and organic it sometimes feels less like a movie and more like life. This is juxtaposed, of course, with the on-stage performing of the play (and especially Hamlet's soliloquy, performed gorgeously — and differently — both by Domingo and Maclin).
Ultimately it's a movie about acting, as we can see in the scenes between Divine G and Divine Eye; the two actors, one an Oscar nominee and one a beginner, adjust their energies to match each other. The more the characters open up, the more they trust, the more they connect, the more honest they seem. (By contrast, Divine G's struggle during the story's second half reveals the dangers of closing up.) As Raci's character says in one scene, being "real and vulnerable" is "something men don't get to do very often." So acting, in its artificiality, leads, for these men, to something true.
Subsequently, the movie manages to avoid preachy details about the prison system, counting on its human characters to illustrate its ill effects. Domingo and Maclin are the keys to Sing Sing, opposites, but alike. Their final moment onscreen together is like letting out a long-held breath and taking in a fresh, new one.
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