Film Review: "American Son" (2019).

"There's been an incident" in American Son. This drama film directed by Kenny Leon, adapted by Christopher Demos-Brown and based on his Broadway play of the same name. Frantic with worry, Kendra Ellis-Connor paces the waiting area of a Miami police station. Her eighteen-year-old son Jamal, a top student about to enter West Point, went out with friends early in the evening and, uncharacteristically, has neither returned nor contacted her. As she waits for her estranged husband Scott, Kendra is interviewed by Officer Paul Larkin, who assures her that his questions about whether Jamal has priors, a street name, or gold teeth are strictly protocol and not racist. Larkin suddenly discloses new details regarding Jamal's whereabouts when Scott arrives, not initially realizing that this white FBI agent is Jamal's father. As the three hash it out in the otherwise deserted waiting area, urgent questions arise concerning the degree to which race, gender, and class play into police procedure.

The film stars Kerry Washington, Steven Pasquale, Jeremy Jordan and Eugene Lee, who all reprise their roles from the play. Almost all the acting here is pointedly overstated, as if the performers are trying to project past an especially long proscenium.

Leon manages to keep everything serious and dramatic, but not without taking a couple of shots at a callous society actively choosing not to hear what they don't like. The resultant study of middle-class disappearance is revolutionary, which, spectacular though the word may sound, does not mean that the film is Leon's best work. Leon liked to pretend that the film was an empty technical exercise, but it introduces the principal themes and motifs of the major period that would begin with A Raisin in the Sun (2008). While its fearless attempt to do something new makes it one of Leon's most interesting movies, I can't pretend to regard it as anywhere near his best. Leon could have chosen a more entertaining subject with which to use the arresting camera and staging technique displayed in the film. Theme is of a thrill murder, done for no reason but to satisfy a sadistical urge and intellectual vanity. The film is a deeply interesting one if not exactly a successful one, you can feel it straining to articulate a truth it doesn't quite grasp. This modestly successful thriller stands out as Leon's first Netflix film and for the presence of two interracial lead characters. The film remains worth seeing, for its difference from cinema in general and from the rest of Leon's work in particular. The film is not merely a stunt that is justified by the extraordinary career that contains it, but one of the movies that makes that career extraordinary. Apart from the tedium of waiting or someone to tell Washington's Kendra of what has happened to her son, the unpunctuated flow of image becomes quite monotonous. It's a curiosity more than anything else, worth seeing once by fans of Leon and Demos-Brown and film and theatre buffs in general, but not one that might appeal to everyone.

Simon says American Son receives: