Mark Reviews Movies: THE WALK (2022)

The Walk, Vertical Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 9, 2022

Director Daniel Adams and George Powell seem torn on the story they want to tell in their screenplay for The Walk. There's the story, perhaps, they think needs to be told, in order to illuminate the effects of racism, and there's the story they appear to believe they need to tell for the movie to reach and appeal to a broader audience. Here, the school desegregation crisis that lasted for years in Boston is dramatized to see both sides of the issue, and that might be the movie's biggest error in judgment.

On one side, we have Black students and families, facing fear, intimidation, threats, and actual violence from white people who don't want those students to attend the public high school in the South Boston neighborhood—ones that had been segregated, not as a matter of official policy, but based on a long history of urban planning and socioeconomic issues. On the other side, well, we have the people causing the fear, doing the intimidating, making the threats, and performing the violence.

Adams and Powell obviously don't take that side, thanks to a couple of exceptions among the ranks of it. Their screenplay, though, certainly does spend a lot of time among it, humanizing it, and trying to reconcile how broadly liberal, working-class, and religious people can be filled with so much hatred.

Does that part of this story need to be told again? In more thoughtful and insightful hands, there might be something to gain from a study of how racism propagates within families, though social pressures, from within systems, and by way of so many parts of society and culture. That's not this story, though, which treats racism as a kind of pernicious villain, just like the gangsters who rule the South Boston neighborhood and are cooking up something terrible for the first day of integration at the local school. Actually, that's not entirely accurate. The gangsters are given more depth in the movie than its dissection of the causes and, especially, the effects of racism.

The basic narrative revolves around two families: one a white family of three from South Boston and the other a father and daughter from the predominantly Black neighborhood of Roxbury. An opening sequence goes from Southie (as it's affectionately and then aggressively referred to by locals), where Kate Coughlin (Katie Douglas) walks to school with her friends every morning and passes by polite mobster McLaughlin (Malcolm McDowell), to Roxbury, where Wendy Robbins (Lovie Simone) walks past a homeless beggar and some drug dealers and a pimp who wants the teen to work for him (as an accountant, he says). The movie is so shallow about matters of these distinct neighborhoods that the latter just comes across as an unfortunate tour of stereotyping.

As for the plot, it begins with a court order for the Boston public schools to be desegregated during the following school year, with buses taking students from Roxbury to Southie and vice versa. The racial animosity foments even more among the locals, especially Kate—who's so blatantly racist that the movie's late attempts to sympathize with and redeem her are laughable—and among those gangsters.

Let's not forget them, because their drama and schemes take up a lot of time that, maybe, could have been spent with Wendy and her father (played by Terrence Howard) instead. Wendy believes in the decency of people, and as the threats and attacks and protests out of Southie escalate, her faith in humanity is shattered.

That, by the way, is a far more intriguing story on its surface than what we get from Kate and her family. Her father Bill (Justin Chatwin) is a police officer, assigned to escort the students from Roxbury when the school year begins, who has escaped the cycle of violence from the mob and racial hatred in the neighborhood, thanks to his devoutly religious wife Pat (Anastasiya Mitrunen). The parents are shocked to discover just how racist their daughter has become, partly to impress the son of Johnny (Jeremy Piven), a gangster just released from prison for a murder charge, who wants revenge on Bill for going to the police.

At times, the very idea of addressing racism comes across as a burden for the story, as the filmmakers seem far more interested in hashing out the family's melodrama and the mobsters' ways. There is, at least, some honesty when Wendy and her father appear and speak frankly, but The Walk gradually diminishes their presence and significance within the larger narrative. After a tense standoff and an eruption of violence, the movie's final moments force Wendy into positions that elevate the goodness or highlight the potential changes of the white characters around her. It's a particularly disingenuous culmination of a foundationally confused movie.

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