Starring: Jeremy Pope, Raul Castillo, McCaul Lombardi, Bokeem Woodbine and Gabrielle Union
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 95 mins. Reviewed in May 2023
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan
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This American film is inspired by the director’s real-life experience as a Marine in the US Navy. It tells the story of a gay black man who undergoes brutal Marine training as a young adult.
Ellis French (Pope) enlists in the Marine Corps of the US Navy, and is assigned to a boot camp on Paris Island in South Carolina, US. On assignment, he is unable to conceal his sexual orientation as a gay person, and during ‘inspection’ of his suitability to be a Marine, he becomes a victim of merciless hazing from his training instructor, Leland Laws (Woodbine), and a fellow recruit, Laurence Harvey (Lombardi).
Pope’s performance earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in 2022. It was Pope’s first performance in a leading screen role, and the film is Elegance Bratton’s directorial debut, and documents the director’s personal persecution at home and in the Marines.
This is a semi-autobiographical film, in which Bratton relives his own attempt to find himself, and face his own identity through the character of Ellis French. Bratton lived in a homeless shelter in New Jersey 10 years after being thrown out onto the streets by his evangelical mother. In this movie, Ellis similarly enlists in the Marines to gain his mother’s approval; he tries to find a new direction in life; and he is traumatically rejected by his mother.
The film shows Ellis as a black youth, who is rejected by his staunchly religious mother, Inez (Union), who cannot accept that her son is gay, and is critical of what she views as her son’s ‘unnaturalness’.
While experiencing fierce and sadistic hazing in the Marine Corps, Ellis finds support among some of his fellow soldiers. When Sgt Laws tries to break his men down, drill sergeant, Rosales, (Castillo) attempts to look for signs of strength in adversity. The film fiercely shows the brutality Ellis experienced in his Navy training, but also celebrates the growth in comradeship that came from the friends he eventually made. The movie authentically mixes the horrors of wartime training, deep-seated prejudice, with comradeship gained under duress. Amid the prejudice that Ellis experienced, the film comments also on anti-Muslim sentiment and homophobic bigotry in the Services.
Sgt Laws inflicts emotional and physical abuse on Ellis. The abuse the film reveals hits hard. Prejudice is equally relevant in the scenes between Ellis and his mother, and authenticity is reinforced by the fact that the movie’s director also experienced a decade of homelessness when his own mother threw him out on the streets, before serving five years as a US Marine.
The movie is not a coming-out story, so much as an account of how a young gay man faced homophobia in the military, and tried to assert his identity as a gay person, despite prejudice and victimisation.
Fuelled by Bratton’s personal torment, Jeremy Pope, as Ellis, portrays both defencelessness and toughness. But Ellis’ toughness comes at a price, under Bratton’s highly personal direction.
This is a film that tries to celebrate hope, without obvious success. It is ultimately an intimate, drama about gayness in the US military. In some ways the film reminds one of Stanley Kubrick’s fiercely impactful, and terrifying movie, Full Metal Jacket (1986), which Bratton also acknowledges.
This film is more emotionally aware of the complexity of the issues that brutality and discrimination raises, but the movie as a whole is a hard one to watch.
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