I Really Liked Sinners!

I can too enjoy an anticipated movie from a popular auteur! Yes, I was frustrated by Nope. I hated Beau Is Afraid. I wrote about my grievances with X and MaXXXine (and keep forgetting to positively discuss Pearl). Once Upon A Time In Hollywood was intermittently great but ultimately so embarrassing I’ve been afraid to watch Licorice Pizza. I’ve been actively avoiding Wes Anderson movies for over a decade. But here's proof I’m not a Debbie Downer about every Film Twitter favorite: I really liked Sinners! 

I knew from Black Panther and Creed that Ryan Coogler was capable of crafting a strong, exciting story around familiar material, but I had no idea what to expect from a Ryan Coogler film without intellectual property to build upon. Fittingly, the accomplishment of Sinners isn’t that different than those of his earlier blockbusters. His ability to create a rich, intriguing world and evolve genre cliche within an original premise suggests his previous commitment to established Hollywood brands was more for producers’ comfort than Coogler’s. 

A virtue of horror is that the first third of a movie can breathe easy. Audiences don’t mind watching young people chat on the beach about nothing in particular when they know shrieking and carnage is inevitable. With Sinners, Coogler spends considerable time establishing the world around prodigal twin gangsters Smoke & Stack, setting up a hometown juke joint in Mississippi with the help of their cousin Sammie, a young blues prodigy. Instead of establishing a looming supernatural threat, Coogler focuses on the communal dynamic and casual violence around the twins, as well as the compartmentalized but constant threat of racist cruelty. It might take some viewers awhile to realize they’re watching a gangster flick, as Coogler’s tone regarding vice is so amiably nonjudgmental. We see fucking, booze, violent negotiation and plenty of swearing, but that’s just life. There’s no contrast with normies to suggest glamorization or exploitation of tragedy. Coogler maturely treats sex and drugs as normie.

Rock & roll, however, or rather, music, is thoroughly romanticized. Aside from a brief interlude of vampire violence, the first real sign of surreality is a musical number that gradually incorporates sounds and iconography from throughout not just African and black history, but indigenous American and Asian cultures as well, that last bit out of respect for the friendly immigrant couple helping out with supplies. This sequence is a bravura move that risks looking like a cornball Super Bowl ad, but benefits from the earlier grounding and our awareness that the time-bending transcendence of music isn’t what the movie’s about. Coogler just takes the time to celebrate it before revealing fangs. 

Ironically, any pretension about music’s divinity is quickly undercut by the revelation that vampires can sing and dance, too. (You might want to stop here if you haven’t seen the movie yet. Though if you check it out on streaming, make sure to watch the credits.) The film’s blood and brutality makes it unquestionably a vampire flick, and the action is exciting and smart enough I didn't regret the change in genre. But Sinners has more in common with an Invasion Of The Body Snatchers movie thematically, particularly Philip Kaufman’s wryly meditative 1978 version. Anytime the film seems to lock in on a metaphorical message about sex, race, religion, community, art or personal freedom, another sequence comes along to undermine it. This supernatural threat to humanity winds up challenging our ideas of what defines “humanity.”

This quirk is true even within the closing credits, despite the Max app shrinking the screen to promote other titles before the film’s coda (hence my warning to the spoiler-phobic!). I must confess I didn’t appreciate the influence of Spike Lee on Sinners until the needlessly protracted finish, an embarrassing staple of the elder’s oeuvre. In a sense, Coogler cueing up the credits before indulging in on-screen reflection is further evidence of his canniness. Instead of making us wonder if the film will ever end, the now-familiar “easter egg” construct lets us know we’re watching an epilogue.

This is just one of the ways Coogler improves on Lee’s attempts at genre fare and black celebration. The sex is unabashed and frank, but with none of Lee’s macho puerility and occasional puritanism. Racists are explicitly and violently told to get fucked, but Coogler neither reduces them to cartoons nor gets bogged down in establishing the parameters of white virtue. Sinners simply isn’t about white America beyond what Smoke & Stack can expect to encounter. Even if Coogler can’t let the story end without commentary, nobody looks at the camera and announces what the audience should do. The characters just acknowledge what they did. 

While I’ve avoided longer reads of the film until getting my own out, I’ve gathered there’s plenty of debate about what Coogler is trying to say, and whether he succeeds. I remember a similar reaction to Jordan Peele’s Us, and I think part of the issue is the assumption black auteurist filmmaking prioritizes clarity of political subtext. Lee is partly to blame for this, as his goal regarding agitprop or commentary was always transparent, with fans enjoying the pith and righteousness of it even when the story itself became clunky or overwrought. By comparison, Us and Sinners make sense as narratives of personal experience more than as polemics. Choices made by characters in terms of their own values & survival are logical, even if the surreal landscape they find themselves them in doesn’t resolve into easy metaphor.

Personally, I love this. It was thrilling when the vampire circle in Sinners grew from tender folk balladry into a multiracial hootenanny, because any expectation of a “do you see” about nonwhite authenticity was thrown out the window. It’s possible Coogler has a grand theory of how race, music and religion coincide, just as Peele might be able to sum up his take on class. But I’m grateful both left room for ambiguity and uncertainty. We know Sammie has more faith in music than religion, and that he’s chosen mortality. But we also learn vampires have some degree of agency, even if it was assumed otherwise, and that Sammie & Stack agree it was a great day before shit got ugly. The question is just why things got ugly, and how to avoid it. This is a question that can be frustrating from an intellectual perspective, but one people do wrestle with.

I don’t want to suggest Coogler’s work is merely a fine-tuning of past Hollywood triumphs, both mainstream and subversive. He and his actors create characters and moments that don’t require much knowledge of film history to resonate. The casually striking cinematography doesn’t scream for citation or even require it. The ensemble is terrific, with even an actor as accomplished as Delroy Lindo hitting notes I didn’t know he could. The film is sexy as fuck without patting itself on the back for it. There’s an essay in how Coogler and Michael B Jordan managed to establish the differences between Smoke & Stack on screen, and I’m excited for a rewatch where I can focus on that. Noting Coogler's work in relation to past cinema is only meant to suggest the bare minimum of what he’s accomplished, when so many American auteurs today struggle to transcend their influences. As I dwell on what was ambiguous, or tonally arresting in Sinners, I can imagine deciding he’s accomplished much more.

If you feel compelled to tell me off, tell me I'm smart, tell me I should chase down Da Sweet Blood Of Jesus or tell me to never type the words "Spike Lee" again, anthonyisright at gmail dot com is the appropriate inbox for such things.