"If we got rid of all gay men in the military, there would be no military," a sympathetic officer tells Navy recruit Ellis French in "The Inspection." That's an exceptionally open take on America's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, considering almost every other Frenchman in boot camp is openly hostile to the idea of a gay man among they. But writer-director Elegance Bratton beat the system—like the character, he had been lost and homeless for a decade before enlisting—and this deeply personal narrative debut is a gay black man's way of showing how he didn't just survive to the experience but was strengthened by it. “The few, the proud”, as they say.
To play himself, er, French, Bratton cast Emmy nominee Jeremy Pope ("Hollywood"), soon to be seen as Basquiat on Broadway in "The Collaboration." Pope gives a performance that launched his career in the role: a man who waits, for a split second, for the uniform to straighten him out, but he can't hide how he feels when all the men shower together, a biological reaction to which he has been mercilessly beaten by his fellow recruits. Getting up, again and again, after such humiliations amounts to a rite of passage for French, who has much to prove to himself and to the incurably homophobic single mother who raised him (Gabrielle Union, tearing herself apart in the pair of scenes that close the movie). ).
Director: Elegance Bratton
Writer: Elegance Bratton
Stars: Jeremy Pope, Gabrielle Union, Bokeem Woodbine
Before "The Inspection," Bratton shot an electrifying group portrait called "Pier Kids," focused on young gay men of color who congregate in lower Manhattan. The documentary was his generation's response to "Paris Is Burning," and this in turn represents his best effort at what ballroom culture calls "military reality": it's a candid and compelling recreation of boot camp as it was. how he lived it. There are so many things the movies get wrong, or deliberately misrepresent, about the military that Bratton's film hopes to correct and expand upon. Foremost on the audience's mind, without a doubt, is Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket," in which a sensitive budding Marine is driven to suicide by pressure from a direct drill instructor. (Meanwhile, other films, like Joel Schumacher's "Tigerland," have embraced the homoeroticism of this hyper-masculine setting.)
Dramatically speaking, there is something inherently terrifying about the process of modesty that basic training imposes, and "The Inspection" confronts that paradox head-on. Between the influences of consumer advertising and identity politics, American culture today is all about expressing one's individuality. But military service operates on exactly the opposite principle, relying on officers like Laws, Rosales ("Looking for" Raúl Castillo's love interest), and Brooks (Nicholas Logan, channeling R. Lee Ermey) to "break" the spirit of the recruits and reform them as soldiers capable of sacrificing themselves for a greater cause. In a sense, both perspectives are necessary for the functioning of a society: we are defined by our differences, but we must also accept our place within the collective.
Becoming a Marine is as important to French as it is to everyone else, maybe more so, and yet he doesn't pretend for a second that it's not complicated. There's the scene in the showers, which is triggered by a vivid gay fantasy, one of several that overwhelms French's imagination, as the entire film is filtered through his subjectivity, in which the other trainees become studs. whom he crosses in a bathhouse. And there is the difficult task of being on night watch while your oversexed comrades touch each other under the covers. Details like this are rarely acknowledged in straight accounts of military experience: they're the "truth" that Tom Cruise can't handle in "A Few Good Men."
It's a testament to the film's honesty that Bratton doesn't pretend the gay recruits are like everyone else. The same goes for the female enlistees, seen only in the fringes of a couple of scenes, a reminder that the world could use a newer, more nuanced version of “G.I. Joan. Equal rights does not necessarily mean that all people are equal, and "The Inspection" stands out for illustrating everything Bratton had to go through to earn his stripes, from misogynistic language to blatant abuse.
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