Review by:
Kenji Fujishima

Consider The Central Park Five the anti-Compliance.

Compliance, you may recall, is the Craig Zobel-directed film that caused a sensation at its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this past January, with reports of walkouts greeting its sobering chronicle of ordinary Americans being duped into doing unspeakable things, lending it a “controversial” aura that has persisted since then, right through to its theatrical release later in the year.

Late in The Central Park Five, the new documentary from Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, when New York historian Craig Steven Wilder proclaims that the most disturbing thing about the false imprisonment of the titular five is how it reveals that, when guided in certain ways, “we are not very good people,” he might as well have been summing up the overarching point of Zobel’s piece of provocation. On the face of it, one might not find much to compare between these two films: one a based-on-true-events fictionalized drama, the other a straight-up documentary. But not only do both, to varying degrees, aim to force us to confront the depths of evil of which we are all capable when pushed, but their methods for doing so aren’t entirely dissimilar.

Craig Zobel opens Compliance by carefully introducing his characters and ensconcing us in a working-class milieu, thereby suggesting a wider context for the offenses to human dignity that are about to take place. The Burnses and McMahon take a similar approach in The Central Park Five, having various journalists and former politicians discuss just how crime-ridden and class-unequal New York City was in the 1980s—an environment that allowed the brutal rape of a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989 to become a city-wide cause célèbre that, through a variety of personal, societal and institutional forces, would eventually lead five young black adults to be sent to prison for a crime they did not commit.

The difference between The Central Park Five and Compliance, however, is the crucial difference between enraged compassion and above-it-all condescension. Though Zobel’s skilled cast of actors occasionally cut through the filmmaker's chilly, single-minded approach, it’s ultimately not enough to banish the sense that Zobel himself, on some level, sees his characters as mere pawns in a thesis drama. That thesis becomes evident within the film’s first 15 minutes of his film and ends up never leading to anything especially revealing about human nature, for all the torturous discomfort it consistently evokes. (In that sense, Zobel is not much better than “Officer Daniels,” the apocryphal law-enforcement official perpetrating these offenses, even if he has a supposed higher purpose in mind.) The Central Park Five aims for more than just faux-provocative titters of discomfort; it not only methodically portrays the systematic failures that lead to this wrongful imprisonment, but also invites us into the lives of the five victims, so that we see the toll this miscarriage of justice takes on them.

On a certain level, The Central Park Five might have benefited from Zobel’s pitiless gaze; Ken Burns, ever the tasteful documentarian, isn’t quite willing to go as far as even historian Craig Steven Wilder does in that one aforementioned pronouncement about humanity, resulting in a film that is perhaps not as disturbing or challenging as it might have been in even angrier hands. (A polemicist with a more fire-and-brimstone style might have asked former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, for instance, whether he regrets his role, however unintentional, in hyping up the Central Park Five’s wrongful imprisonment.) Nevertheless, there is something to be said for allowing facts and testimonies to speak for themselves, especially when the facts and testimonies are as damning and devastating as they are in this particular case. The Central Park Five may be a merely good film on a great subject, but as a humane call for compassion and understanding, it is undeniably powerful.