In considering Blue Caprice, one should note that here comes a point where a rational mind becomes irrational, when explicable circumstances give way to decisions and connections developed in a non-linear fashion. This is usually where most movies about murderers and psychopaths lie; the decision to take a life isn’t exactly a wise one, particularly in an age of maximum surveillance and DNA technology rendering all violent activity relatively witless unless it occurs in the literal hinterlands. This doesn’t detract from the fact that people still get murdered every day, in areas rural, industrial and urban. Sometimes, there is no movie-appropriate way to convey the motives behind these actions, and other times filmmakers strain to make it seem immoral, but vaguely justifiable (it seems as if 90 percent of all Hollywood product worships at the altar of ‘revenge’). Often, you can only take an audience so far, and it’s up to an innate connection with onscreen performers where the taking of a life seems advisable.
Blue Caprice is such a film, dedicated towards depicting the chilling events of 2002 when a man and his young recruit opened fire on complete strangers, leaving Washington D.C. in a wake of terror. These incidents sparked outrage, though ultimately people didn’t understand how to react. Speeches were made, and movies were postponed, but other than some half-hearted pressure on gun control laws that lives and dies every time violent murder reaches the big cities, there was no lasting reaction. How could there be? The targets were chosen at random, executed with extreme prejudice and with no clear agenda or strategy at play. Real life had no talking point to offer this heinous event, which captured headlines nearly a year after the horrors of September 11th, further reminding us that millennial life seemed karmically dedicated towards being alone. After all, we are all potential targets.
The picture’s emphasis on this point comes from the narrow focus on John Allen Muhammad (Isaiah Washington) and teenaged Lee (Tequan Richmond). A chance encounter brings them together, as Muhammad is in the midst of an ugly battle with his ex-wife, and soft-spoken Lee is absent a father figure while simultaneously being abandoned by his mother. In the docile youth, Muhammad sees not only a potential ally, but a lifeline. He’s grown untethered from this life, and the severe failure of empathy that keeps him from understanding the threat he represents to his own children instead manifests itself with a chance to start over. Muhammad and Lee are soon a traveling family, a nimble-mouthed wayward father preying on the lack of direction in the boy. Lee is not a disruptive child, but he’s clearly at a key moment in his life, where his lack of true ambition gives the opportunity to manipulative forces for seduction. Muhammad hasn’t found a son; he’s found a puppet.
Slowly, Lee begins to buy into Muhammad’s victim complex. With little cash to his name, Muhammad is hitting up exes, living off the fat of the land and telling anyone who’ll listen that this obedient young boy is his son. Muhammad doesn’t hesitate to deliver speeches, no matter how meandering or wrongheaded they are. Washington, to his credit, is a forceful, magnetic actor who, if you read the tabloids, has been a victim of his own poor temper and unprofessionalism. If you hadn’t known that going in, you would assume he’s the next mega-viable leading man. His carefully controlled rage is the perfect cover, as his composure is all that’s keeping the derangement from seeping out. Often, he’ll launch into a diatribe about how outside forces are keeping him from legally finding the location of his ex-wife and kids. In other moments, Washington’s eyes will casually drift towards the coverage of military occupation in the Middle East, and it’s the actor’s furrowed brow that tells the tale. Washington brings the right sense of gravity to this role, to the point where his nonsense almost begins to reveal believable connections. When Washington speaks, it’s with an unquestionable authority, and you immediately buy that Muhammad could be smooth enough to make a pretty woman ignore his vagrancy and serious enough to earn the trust of a folksy backwoods-type (Tim Blake Nelson).
Muhammad initially seems disorganized and uncertain, as his constant speeches to the mostly-silent Lee veer wildly between broad mentorship and the venting of sour grapes. Once a former fling boots him, he makes the decision to raise this child. Often, he’s putting a couple of coins in the youth’s hand and telling him to get lost while he beds another conquest, but he also begins to train the child and mold him from a boy into a man. Out of context, these sequences work: Muhammad treats the boy as a military man would, and a desperate Lee observes every inch of body language, searching from a sign of approval. You could argue he finds it through Muhammad’s casual shrugs as a sign of confirmation bias. Once guns enter the picture, there’s a queasy realization that things are about to go wrong. Even if you forget the film’s subject matter entering the third act, suspiciously penetrative stabs on the soundtrack are there to awkwardly remind you.
Director Alexandre Moors captures Muhammad’s shooting spree as something of a holy war, sending Muhammad and Lee on the warpath. As he explains to his son, their actions are a way to level an unfair playing field. He switches instructions, ordering the shootings to be random, then denying this and deciding that they had to purposely target a new victim each time. The shootings themselves are grotesque in their recreation of a suburban milieu only to puncture the safety bubble with violence. Moors places us inside the crosshairs, forcing the audience to become an unwilling participant in this crime. Frankly, I am comfortable telling you that Moors is clearly a filmmaker with sharp instincts, but I cannot endorse that voyeuristic type of violence. Your mileage may vary.
Moors never manages to convey that exact level of engagement that turns Muhammad and Lee from viable protagonists into cold-blooded killers. Lee’s sense of dedication to his new father figure feels assumed rather than earned, as the constant training he endures (including being tied up in the forest) feels like he’s been beaten into submission, not turned on to his father’s worldview. Richmond, in a mostly reactive and often silent role, is good at internalizing his confusion and hormonal sense of rejection. Washington, too, is excellent. Together, they’re an immensely watchable entry into a fairly impenetrable story. The multiple shootings that occurred back in 2002 still don’t make rational sense. Perhaps even the most well-intentioned art just can’t help bridge that divide.
Den of Geek Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars