he Hurricane is Norman Jewison’s long, slow, and unimpeachably worthy tribute to the spirit of Rubin “The Hurricane” Carter, the middleweight boxing contender of the mid-Sixties, fitted up on a phoney murder charge by racist cops and falsely imprisoned for nearly 20 years, along with another innocent man, John Artis.
Carter became a living legend once Bob Dylan wrote his 1975 song Hurricane about him. But what is extraordinary about his story – apart from the impenitent vindictiveness with which New Jersey state pursued its claim for years after Carter was finally released in 1985 – is the fact that his really was an American life with a second act.
His jailhouse autobiography, published in 1974, was read by a young Brooklyn boy, Lesra Martin (Vicellous Reon Shannon), who had been adopted by a commune-household of well-meaning white liberals in Toronto. Their remarkable joint efforts got Carter free, long after he’d given up. The film is based on Lesra’s own book as well as Carter’s, and Jewison’s movie encourages us to think of them to some extent as parallel heroes, the film’s senior and junior partner.
Denzel Washington brings to the lead role his habitual intelligence, dignity and calm. The film develops on familiar, conventional lines. Dan Hedaya is typecast as the vicious white cop who has got it in for Carter from day one. Carter’s early fights are shown in black-and-white, introducing the names of the contenders in a sans-serif legend at the bottom of the screen – a straight steal from Raging Bull. His post-boxing career as a political prisoner of race unfolds as his marriage breaks down and his legal campaign on the outside runs into the brick wall of bigotry, corruption and cover-up. With almost supernatural inner strength, Washington’s Carter retreats into a defiant yet defensive shell of stoicism.
But the movie’s relative absence of radical anger is conspicuous when it is compared – as it inevitably must be – with Washington’s prison experience in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. The Hurricane is not an overtly politicised movie in the same way, and there is an implicitly liberal, even paternalistic message in the fact that Carter’s salvation comes because young Lesra has been adopted away from his black family by white Canadians – with nothing but happy results. (We learn later that Lesra’s real parents have become alcoholics and his brother has done jail time, but these tricky subjects are not dramatised.)
This outcome appears to betoken the possibility of happy, enlightened relations between the races – and why shouldn’t it? – but no one discusses this out loud. And the film’s implied belief that this state of affairs effectively supersedes Sixties redneck racism looks naive.
Where the film is lacking is in its kidglove treatment of Carter’s famous supporters. The film has clips of Bob Dylan, Ellen Burstyn, Muhammad Ali, and Joe Frazier all doing their sincere bit. In fact, celeb support for Rubin was a more interesting phenomenon than the film implies. Rolling Stone in the Seventies reported on a show put on in prison by Dylan and a cast of superstars for Rubin Carter and a mostly black audience of prisoners in Clinton, New Jersey. They loved Dylan, Roberta Flack and Allen Ginsberg, but Joni Mitchell’s supercilious songs were booed and she shrilly lectured Carter and the rest of the inmates: “We came here to give you love; if you can’t handle it that’s your problem.” A more caustic film, less concerned with the lump-in-the-throat aesthetic, might have tried to show this. Not this film.
Later, Carter’s lawyers wryly allude to the celebs who do not stay the course. The implication that Dylan et al are just fairweather friends (even unquestioned heroes like Ali) is not one that Jewison cares to pursue – and sometimes the movie looks uncomfortably like an extension of precisely this sort of celebrity support.
The film rolls on towards the conventional courtroom climax in which Rod Steiger, as a Solomon-like judge, rules definitively in Carter’s favour and frees him. It certainly feels like a long and winding road. Rubin Carter’s story is genuinely remarkable, as is the story of the ordinary, non-famous people whose persistent efforts got him out of prison. But this movie feels dutiful and earnest, and oddly without the fire and anxiety and rage of real life. The Hurricane is so concerned, finally, to construct a humane closure for the agonies of Rubin Carter, that it becomes disconnected from the burning sense of racial injustice that kick-started this extraordinary story in the first place.