Steve James follows three former gang members who step into Chicago’s street fights and talk people out of killing each other. It is patient, frightening and often moving, and it goes on longer than it needs to. Ameena Matthews alone is worth the evening.
Steve James has made a film about people whose job is to walk into an argument that is about to become a shooting. They work for CeaseFire, a Chicago programme that treats gun violence as a disease passed from person to person, and they are called violence interrupters. Most of them used to be the people doing the shooting. James and the writer Alex Kotlowitz follow three of them through a year, and the film is very good: careful, tense, often moving, and long enough that its shape goes soft in the middle. That is the verdict. The rest is detail.
Ameena Matthews is the detail most people will remember. She is a small woman in a headscarf who walks into a group of young men on a corner and does not stop talking until they do. Early on there is a funeral for a teenager, and James keeps his camera on her as she works the boy’s friends, who are already deciding who to blame. She does not plead and she does not lecture. She tells them what will happen next if they do what they are planning, in the voice of someone who has watched it happen. Her scenes with Caprysha Anderson, a girl she is trying to keep off the street, are the film’s most painful, because Ameena is very good at this and it is still not clear it will be enough.
Cobe Williams is the gentle one. He has a big laugh and he uses it, and his method is to sit in a man’s kitchen for as long as it takes. There is a scene where he goes to see a man whose house has just been raided by police, who is furious and has said out loud what he means to do about it. Cobe sits down, asks about his mother, and waits. We were frightened through the whole of it, and not for Cobe. It was the man’s hands we were watching, and James, who does not cut away, was watching them too. Eddie Bocanegra, the third, served a long sentence for a killing he committed as a teenager, and he carries it into every room; his work is with children, and he is quieter than the other two.
James edits the film with Aaron Wickenden, and their choice is to keep the camera where the talking is and let it run. There is no narration and nobody is asked to re-enact anything. Joshua Abrams’s music is low and spare and mostly keeps out of the way, which in a film about grief is harder than it sounds. Gary Slutkin, who founded the programme, and Tio Hardiman, who runs the interrupters, supply the theory in short bursts, and the film does not linger on either of them. It is more interested in the corner than the office.
The length is the problem. At 129 minutes this is already a shorter version than the one shown at festivals, and it still has a middle hour in which an intervention is followed by a meeting, which is followed by a memorial, which is followed by another intervention. Some of that is the point; the work is repetitive and the city keeps producing new cases. But a film can make that point and then move on, and this one makes it three or four times. Some of the talk also goes by fast and low, and we lost a few exchanges we would have liked to hear. And the film never asks whether the programme works across a city rather than one kitchen at a time. Slutkin’s claim is stated. It is not tested.
Set against James’s own Hoop Dreams (1994), which followed two boys for years and found a story in them, this has the same patience and less shape. It does not build; it accumulates. That is honest about the work, and it is also why the second hour feels like the first.
Watch it at home, where you can go back for the sentences you missed, and where you will not have to be anywhere afterwards. It is not a film to leave quickly.
