Movie Review: Abacus: Small Enough to Jail

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail **** / *****

Directed by: Steve James.

 

In the wake of the Financial crisis of 2008 all the big banks pretty much got off Scot Free – or with bailout money, that yes, eventually they repaid, although that didn’t help all those people who got screwed over. Prosecutors in New York did go after one bank however for their mortgage practices – and that bank was Abacus: Savings and Loan – a bank you have probably never heard of, and, in reality, there is no reason for you to have heard of it. It’s not a major bank – it doesn’t have millions of customers, or anything. But it is an important bank for the family that runs it – and those who use it. It was started by Thomas Sung – now almost 80 – a Chinese immigrant, who got frustrated when he realized that banks were willing to take his money in deposits, but none of them seemed to want to lend him – or other Asian Americans – any money. He set up a bank in Chinatown in New York City to change that. He operated the business for years – and now two of his daughters run have continued that legacy. There were some shady things happening in their mortgage department – but when the Sung family discovered them, they fired the employees who did them, and even reported them to their regulators, and co-operated with the D.A.’s office up to the point where they realized that they were no longer being treated as witnesses, but as suspects. While no one in the Sung family was personally indicted with a felony – the corporation itself was. The Sung family decided to fight the charges – not in least because unlike the major banks, who got slaps on the wrists or hit with fines, the D.A. refused to let them off with anything less than a felony conviction – which would doom them as a bank.

 

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail is a documentary by Steve James – the great filmmaker behind such films as Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters and Life Itself. Here, he seemingly sets an impossible task for himself – to make a bank sympathetic – but it really doesn’t take him that long to do that. The film spends a lot of time with the Sung family – father, mother and three daughters, all of whom are smart, witty, charming and tough as nails. In short, they are not going down without a fight.

 

As the film goes on, it slightly expands its focus to Chinatown – and Chinese immigrants in general. While the bank fully admits that some of their employees did shady things in their mortgage department – they say they did everything they could to co-operate with the investigation into them, and have nothing to hide on a corporate level. The movie follows the trial closely – and it’s amazing how flimsy the evidence against Abacus is. After all the months – years – of investigation, this is what they had on Abacus, and they still decided to go to trial? To be fair, I’m not wholly convinced that Abacus did nothing wrong – but there isn’t any proof that they did, and many other banks did far, far worse things. I am more on the side of those in the documentary who believe that the D.A. wanted to show they were tough on banks – and decided to pick one to prosecute – just one that wasn’t too big, and only effected a small enough community that it wouldn’t hurt anyone election chances.

 

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail is a fascinating documentary on several levels – as a legal thriller, as a document of how banks operate, as a family drama and more. It doesn’t quite have the scope of James’ Hoop Dreams, or quite the emotional resonance of The Interrupters of Life Itself – but it’s another wonderful documentary by one of the documentarians in the business.

Movie Review: Life Itself

Life Itself
Directed by: Steve James.

In the five years since I started the blog, I have never been secretive about the influence that Roger Ebert has had on me – as someone who writes movie reviews, and even as someone who loves movies. He was the first – and for many years, pretty much the only – movie critic I read. As an aspiring cinephile, Roger Ebert’s reviews – in the form of his Video Yearbooks – were a massive influence – and I rented so many of the movies that made me fall in love with the art form because of Roger Ebert. I hardly ever get that upset when famous people die – but Ebert’s death in 2013 affected me greatly for weeks on end after I found out. I finally decided to pick up his wonderful book – Life Itself – about his life and career. It is a wonderful book – about movies, yes, but also about, well, life. Steve James’ documentary covers much of – although not all of – the same material – but also different stuff as well – namely the end of Ebert’s life. They started filming just a few months before Ebert’s death – and the result is a heartbreaking, inspiring, funny, sad, brilliant documentary.\

The film jumps around in time a little bit – mixing a standard film biography, full of well-chosen archival footage and interviews with Ebert’s friends and family – with scenes of Ebert in the late stages of his life – mostly in the hospital. He seems in good spirits – as does his wife Chaz – as both seem optimistic that this latest treatment will work, and Ebert, who had already lost his ability to speak, eat and drink – will survive for a little bit longer. He is determined to keep working – he loves attending movies, loves writing about movies, and loves his blog – and his readers. He’s already had a long career, and no one would have blamed him for retiring – but for Ebert his work, and his wife, were the reason he kept going. He doesn’t fear death, but as long as he’s alive, he was going to keep working.

 

The movie is an excellent portrait of Ebert’s life and career. Everything you could want is covered here – not much about his childhood, but a lot about his early years, as the editor of the student paper in university, to how he became a film a critic, a lot about his partnership and friendship with Gene Siskel (and nothing about Richard Roeper), his years as an alcoholic, he recovery, his late marriage to Chaz – who became his whole world – and finally his illness and death. All of it is covered with intelligence, humor and charm. I’m not going to argue that the film is innovative cinematically – James sticks to the standard documentary forum – but it’s a wholly entertaining package – and provides enough information not covered in Ebert’s book that you’ll learn some new things about the man.

But none of this explains why I think Life Itself is a brilliant, even somewhat profound movie. That is harder to explain – but let me try anyway. The film is a reminder of why we go to the movies, why we love them – and why they matter. Ebert loved movies – and he never lost that love. With many critics, eventually you sense that they’ve lost that love that got them into the business in the first place – that they’ve grown cynical and dismiss everything. Ebert never got to that point. Right up until the end, he clearly loved movies – was clearly moved by them – and clearly poured that passion into his reviews. Watching the film, that love comes through, and is infectious. Few movies have the power to transport me back to the time that I fell in love with the movie – but this is one of them. For much of the movie, I had a smile plastered on my face.

The parts I didn’t have a smile on my face, I was on the verge of tears. As Ebert was in the final months of his life, his relationship with Chaz, his attempts at rehab, and mostly his attitude towards death and dying was inspiring. I was reminded of one of my favorite movies – and the movie Ebert said would be the first one he would watch if he was told he was dying – Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru – where a bureaucrat is determined to do one worthwhile thing before he dies. Both films are about death, but not in a depressing way, but in an inspiring one,

Even if that still sounds depressing, let me assure you that Life Itself is a treasure trove of entertaining moments – from some of the great clips from Siskel & Ebert – and interviews with filmmakers who inspired Ebert – and were in turn inspired by him – Martin Scorsese, who credits a tribute at TIFF from Siskel &   Ebert for getting him through a tough time in his life, to Errol Morris who credits their love of Gates of Heaven – and their undying support of it for his entire career, to Werner Herzog who calls him a soldier of cinema to relative newcomer Ramin Bahrani, who Ebert supported tirelessly. Steve James himself is another director on that list – Siskel & Ebert`s love of Hoop Dreams helped his career immensely.

Life Itself is a funny, sad, entertaining documentary about a lot things from cinema to death to, of course, life. It is a great documentary – even if you didn’t love Roger Ebert. But if you love movies, how the hell could you not love Roger Ebert.

Movie Review: The Interrupters

The Interrupters ****

Directed by: Steve James.

Most people join gangs so that for once in their lives they can feel like they belong to something greater than themselves. They often come from homes with abusive or absentee parents. They fool themselves into thinking that being part of a gang makes them important and tough. By the time they grow up, and realize what they were doing was stupid, it’s already too late for many of them. They are in jail or dead. Violence erupts on streets dominated by gangs for no real reason – someone insults you or a rival gang member walks down the wrong street and violence erupts, which simply leads to that other gang coming back and more violence erupting. It’s a never ending cycle of violence where too many young men and women in America are being killed for no real reason.

Steve James, who directed the magnificent documentary Hoop Dreams in 1994 (that film would still make my list of the 10 greatest docs of all time), returns to the streets of Chicago with The Interrupters. Based on a magazine article by Alex Kotlowitz, who made this film alongside James, it follows the year in the life of people who work for CeaseFire – a group of violence “interrupters” who work the streets of Chicago. These interrupters are former gang members who have done jail time – some very serious jail for crimes like murder. They know precisely where these young gang members are coming from, because they went through it. Now they are older and wiser – and see the error of their ways, and try to prevent others from making the same mistakes. They go out onto the streets and try to defuse violent situations. Often times, violence breaks out on the spur of the moment, and if they can just settle things down for a little while to give everyone a chance to think about their actions a little, then lives can be saved.

James and his small crew show no fear when making this documentary. They are right alongside the interrupters when they go to work – and step right into the middle of violent situations. If the young gang members even notice the camera, they don’t seem to care – they go about doing the same thing anyway.

Do the interrupters really make a difference? Somewhat, I’m sure. We do follow a few of the lives of the people the interrupters reach out to, and one man, named Flamo of all things, goes from wanting to kill someone when we first meet him, to having an actual job by the end. Another young girl continually gets angry and screws up her progress, and has to start all over again. But Ameena Matthews, who is the interrupter handling her, doesn’t give up. She’ll allow her to screw up again and again – because you cannot help people who won’t help themselves – but she’ll always be there when she calls and needs help. Still other young people we only see once in the movie and they say things to the interrupters like “You just don’t understand” or “Not everyone thinks the same way”. These are the ones who are going to do what they’re going to do no matter what. One interrupter calls what they are doing little more than band-aid for a crime epidemic in this country. If so, it’s still better than nothing.

What stands out most to me about the movie is the interrupters themselves. These are people who have led violent lives, and somewhere along the way, have decided to change their ways. Someone like Ameena Matthews has embraced religion – she’s Muslim – and is raising her kids up right, and wants to give others the same chance. Her father was one of the most famous Chicago gang members in history – still serving time in jail, where he’ll never get out. Cobe Williams, another interrupter, recalls when his son came to see him in jail, and never wanted to go through that again. Eddie Bocanegra spent 14 years in jail for murder, and while in jail found art, and no tries to help other express themselves that way. He is still haunted by the life he took – and one of the most powerful sequences in the movie is when he revisits the scene of the crime.

The Interrupters turns its camera on what is a national problem of gang violence, where young men and women are killing each other for little or no reason. The movie says that more people are killed by this sort of violence every year than the numbers of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. I remember when school shootings like Columbine made national headlines, and everyone was asking could be done to stop them, when the whole time more young men and women were being killed in the inner cities due to gang violence than would ever die in school shootings, and nothing was being done to stop it.

Are the interrupters just band-aids? Perhaps they are, as gang violence is still rampant in the streets of America’s major cities. But at least they are doing something, and some lives are definitely saved because of their actions. That’s better than sitting back and doing nothing.