Power is almost always equated with violence: all of those old-school movie heroes, from John Wayne to Arnold Schwarzenegger, were males who proved their worth on screen through killing, mutilating, beating the villains, and saving the day. But there’s another level of power: the power to be vulnerable, to open up, to inspire and get inspired. Then, there are subtle male vulnerability expositions that leave viewers curious and wide open, like fish with hooks in their mouths.
That’s Divine G (Colman Domingo) in Sing Sing. Greg Kwedar’s new prison drama is based on books about and stories by Divine G, a former Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison inmate, and his work as part of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program. It has everything a cinephile could hope for: powerful performances, tight and narrow frames, a handheld camera that dances with the actors as they rehearse for a play, and lighting that leaves a grainy, hazy feel to a beautifully oppressive film.
That’s the key to Sing Sing, and Domingo, one of the major, most deserving Best Lead Actor contenders in this awards season. There’s beauty in the breakdown. A subtlety to a taboo subject such as male vulnerability. It’s nuanced because it’s a prison setting, and men have to live their tough upfronts to the end. It’s poetic because our main protagonist is a playwright, a man incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit. For someone like Divine G, there’s no greater pain. An artist under lock and key, trapped in a world where he can’t get out. What greater torment than to be Divine G as he tries to hold on to light in the confinement of a prison cell, grasping for dear life in this Rehabilitation Through The Arts (RTA) program and finding his creativity and inspiration by building a life within a life?
This character arc sounds complicated and messy, potentially unsettling in the hands of a less profound and magnetic actor than Domingo. It’s easy to dismiss other performances this awards season after watching him dominate the screen, eating up every scene like a howling ghoul but doing it with sad, desperate eyes and lips that have a smile plastered on them half the time. He walks a fine line between hope and despair, but even at the most heightened moments of openness and embracing everything there is to indulge in from the bleak existence of incarceration, his underlying melancholy works like a trigger warning, anticipating any hint of mutiny to go off script.
Divine G defies oppression and plays the role of a surrogate father to his fellow inmates. He’s not exactly a hero, but more of a provocateur when needed, and he can bring a nurturing, distinctly maternal – not paternal – energy when the situation calls for it. But it’s not until the film fleshes out his interactions with fellow inmates —most prominently Mike Mike (Sean San José) and Divine Eye (Clarence Maclin)— that the film plays out differently. Only then do we witness Divine G’s protective facade begin to crack, his false optimism crumble, and his anger and frustration with injustice build to a powerful breakdown—an intense scene that only actors of the highest versatility can convincingly deliver. Domingo takes the audience through the rollercoaster of emotions going through a man hanging by a thread to the hope in his heart, trying everything to avoid the fact that he’s been unjustly treated and doesn’t deserve to have his free artistic soul held captive.
In one scene, Domingo’s Divine G extends his hand across a window as if he can reach the Hudson River, and I feel compelled to reach out to him so that our hands would touch. A performance that allows a person to break through emotional barriers is worthy of award prestige and recognition. Domingo has delivered several awards-caliber performances, including Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and through Zola and Rustin (which earned him his first Oscar nomination last year). In Sing Sing though, he does something entirely different, building on the past but refining the present. For this feature, his Academy Award nomination is not only a must, but his win is also a triumph, not just for a brilliant, sensitive artist, but for the power of the arts as represented in the film he’s carrying on his shoulders.
