Mark Reviews Movies: BRIAN BANKS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 9, 2019

A basic summary of Brian Banks might make it seem as if the film has either some unfortunate timing or a distasteful agenda to push. It's a dramatization of the true story of the eponymous man, a promising football player in high school, who had university recruiters offering him scholarships and an almost certain future as a professional. His life, though, was upended when, at the age of 16, he was falsely accused of kidnapping and raping a fellow student.

This alleged incident, by the way, happened in a stairwell of a crowded part of the school, where the supposed abduction would have been seen by at least 10 full classrooms of students and teachers. It wouldn't make any sense to anyone who actually saw the layout of the scene of the purported crime. That was the problem: No one, not the cops or the prosecutors or the young man's attorney, even bothered to visit the location.

There's a lot of vital and necessary discussion happening in this country about sexual crimes, as well as a culture of coerced silence, direct or implied intimidation, and societal shaming that prevents survivors from speaking up and seeking justice. Some might read this brief summary of the film's story and assume that the filmmakers have set out to question or place doubt on the importance of that conversation.

That's far from the point, which takes this specific case and paints a broad picture of a justice system that has the potential to fail at every point. Worse, it doesn't care if there is a failure. The work is finished, and that's the end of the matter.

The accusation, made by a teenage girl who quite literally didn't know what she was saying and was encouraged by an opportunistic mother, isn't the issue. It's that the legal system itself was in such a rush to finish its work that it didn't even bother to start the job. In the process, it stole over a decade of an innocent man's life and nearly condemned him to a lifetime of being ostracized from society.

This issue is the story that screenwriter Doug Atchison and director Tom Shadyac set out to tell, and they do so with conviction and compassion. It is not, mind you, a dissection of any specific legislation or policies, and that might be to the film's benefit. Its focus is on the human story, not the procedural one.

At the film's start, Brian (Aldis Hodge) is on probation after being released from a six-year sentence in prison. He has returned to playing football at a local city college, but at a special meeting called by his parole officer (played by Dorian Missick), Brian learns that he must wear a GPS-tracking device around his ankle 24 hours a day.

Additionally, he's not allowed within 2,000 feet of any school or park, meaning that his return to football is finished until his probation is complete. As he tells his mother Leomia (Sherri Shepherd), nobody starts playing football at the age of 27. Meanwhile, the job market offers nothing to someone who has to check the box that he or she has been convicted of a felony.

Brian thinks he has a case for Justin Brooks (Greg Kinnear), an attorney who runs the California Innocence Project, which works to exonerated people who have been wrongly convicted of a crime. Brian, though, took a plea bargain and is out of prison, and California law requires that new evidence, unavailable at the time of the trial, must be used in any exoneration proceeding. With his passion and dedication, Brian eventually convinces the lawyer to help him.

Atchison juggles these two main aspects of the story—Brian's personal struggles to make a life for himself as a convicted felon and the complex, uncaring labyrinth of the legal process—in such a way that one never overshadows the other. We see Brian's failed attempts to get work, always meeting rejection with an almost apologetic smile that hides how crushing it all is.

He meets and starts a relationship with Karina (Melanie Liburd). Later, she reveals that she's a rape survivor whose accusations were never investigated or even heard. The revelation might sound like an act of deflecting criticism that this story might be seen as a wider, more skeptical statement about accusations of sexual crime. While the scene is in line with the film's compassionate viewpoint, maybe it is also that other thing to a degree.

Around the second act, the primary focus turns to the legal process, through investigations and strategy meetings and, of course, the build-up to the big, climactic courtroom scene. The filmmakers don't get bogged down in the procedures or the jargon. They're mostly concerned with having as many characters as possible state the inherent injustice of Brian's original trial, his time in prison, his current predicament, and the fact that he'll be a registered sex offender for the rest of his life. It's grandstanding, for sure, but the depiction of each part of this seemingly unending cycle, as well as the strength of the performances, goes a long way to selling the arguments.

Hodge's performance is perhaps the key to all of it. As Brian, the actor never resorts to playing the caricature of a victim, a martyr, or some fount of strength and determination. He is, quite simply, a man trying to do his best against impossible odds, facing frustration after frustration while trying, most of all, to maintain a sense of purpose and dignity (The film's climactic moment is an astonishing close-up of Hodge's face, as more than a decade of pain washes away). That's the core of Brian Banks, an effective and, above all else, human story of a wrong set right.

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