In an era when most big studio releases lack even a single idea, Inside Man has two. One comes from the screenwriter, Russell Gewirtz, who thought up a devilishly clever title and a theme to go with it. The other comes from Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment, which could easily have made Inside Man from the standard white man's point of view but instead hired Spike Lee to direct. Yes, Lee did a contract job--but that doesn't mean he slapped his coat of paint onto someone else's house. Chronically alert to social divisions in general and the racial divide in particular, Lee heightened the existing tensions between characters and possibly added a few of his own--choices that contributed not just to the style but to the meaning of Inside Man.

The theme is spoken directly into the camera at the beginning of the film, in close-up, so nobody can later claim that Inside Man is merely a bank-heist movie. "Listen closely to what I say," states Clive Owen, calmly but quickly. "Not everyone in a cell is a prisoner." The full import of this adage must not be revealed--although I may be excused for explaining that Owen's character, one Dalton Russell, does in fact rob a bank, in the course of which crime he becomes a prisoner of a sort. He and his crew, disguised as house painters, take hostage a large number of bank employees and customers but then are discovered in mid-robbery by the cops. Russell is surrounded and shut in; but as police detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) begins to understand, this confinement may actually be a part of Russell's plan.

I do not think I'm turning Inside Man into a Rorschach blot when I say that Frazier, too, is a man in a tight spot, who needs to figure out which of his constraints he ought to embrace. On the personal level, he feels cramped by his lover (who wants to get married) and by her low-life brother, who bunks down just outside the bedroom door. On a professional level, he feels he is routinely put in a box, whether by Internal Affairs (which makes him the first suspect when cash evidence goes missing) or by the average white captain on duty (Willem Dafoe), who sees a black detective, second grade, and reflexively ignores him. The options for Frazier draw tighter still when a mysterious fixer named Madeleine White (Jodie Foster, dressed in a crisp suit accessorized with a shark's smile) shows up at the crime scene with the mayor in tow to explain that she will be given full co-operation. To do what, only she knows.

Frazier's animosity toward White would not have been so keen, his desire to break rules so pressing, his routine disbelief of people's stories so openly satirical, if he had not been played by Washington, with Lee directing. The combination of actor and director intensifies every aspect of Gewirtz's screenplay, including Frazier's evolving relationship with the increasingly enigmatic bank robber. Thanks to the film's ability to be in two places at once, we see moments that are denied to Frazier--odd events that make Dalton Russell seem surprisingly humane, or even benevolent. When Russell at last shows this side of himself to Frazier, offering him a piece of good advice, the detective responds with instinctive sarcasm; but as the film plays out, we also sense that some understanding has passed between these two men, both of them smart outsiders forced to hole up.

* * *

In a town called Kumba in Cameroon, several different traditional societies have come up against modernity in the form of women wielding judicial power. So I learn from the documentary Sisters in Law, directed by Kim Longinotto with Florence Ayisi: a feature-length account of some of the cases handled in 2004 by state prosecutor Vera Ngassa and court president Beatrice Ntuba.

Two of the matters were historic: successful prosecutions of spousal abuse, brought by astonishingly brave women from the Muslim community. Others were merely heartbreaking: the rape of a 9-year-old by a Bible-thumping neighbor, the brutal beating of a tiny girl by the guardian who was "correcting" her. How did Ngassa and Ntuba come to have power to deal with these things? Unfortunately, the film gives no context. But the women--all of them--are so compelling, and the sense of justice so satisfying, that I can't imagine any audience resisting Sisters in Law. It premieres theatrically April 12 at New York's Film Forum.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.