The One Movie That’s Honest About Policing
This story is part of my weekly “Have you seen …” series where I highlight movies that I think are under-appreciated, misunderstood, or simply worth talking about. New entries are published every Wednesday.
What’s the point of a movie? Most would say to entertain, cynics woulds say to make money. I’m no optimist, but I’d like to think that it’s something more — even casual viewers will know firsthand that movies can teach, console, and enrage as powerfully as any other medium.
It makes sense, then, that when shit hits the fan in the real, some turn to movies for help. Like any other works of arts, films are ultimately just statements: they say something with style.
With the unprecedented levels of unrest in the United States and globally the last few days, I was wracking my brain for movies that could teach me something about what’s going on. There are many excellent movies about the complexity and tragedy of the black experience in America, there are plenty of great films about the power of riot and demonstration, and there’s no shortage of movies about cops — therein lies the problem.
Hollywood has never been lacking in cop dramas, but they never stray too far from the beaten path. Almost universally, police officers in these films are either the unquestioned protagonists or they’re senselessly corrupt; in the latter case, that’s usually just because they’re a foil for the noble protagonist-cop.
Steve Rose over at The Guardian did a good job documenting Hollywood’s rather tepid history with tackling issues of policing and race relations, but the conversation has just extended far beyond those boundaries. The Minneapolis City Council has just voted to disband their city’s police department, and other cities across the country are looking at ways their police departments can be restructured from the ground up. Thus I had to ask myself the question: where are the police reform movies?
In my cinematic memory, no film truly fits the bill except for Sidney Lumet’s 1973 feature Serpico. Broadly speaking, the film is true story of Frank Serpico, an officer in the NYPD who takes a stand and exposes department-wide corruption despite significant internal opposition. The twists are few, the set pieces nonexistent: this is a film about how one honest man navigates a dishonest system.
The movie lays all of its cards on the table in the opening scene: Al Pacino, playing the titular cop, lies in the backseat of a cop car with a bullet hole in his head. The power of this image might be a bit lost on contemporary viewers: Pacino was hot off of his starring role in The Godfather and had gone from being the Next Big Thing to being the Currently Big Thing almost overnight — to have the film open with his slack, bloody face is a telling move.
Immediately after, a call comes into a dark, understaffed police precinct. The cop receiving the call says that Serpico has just been shot to which the other asks if he thinks a cop did it. The first cop responds:
“I know six cops said they’d like to.”
There are plenty of great films about police corruption — The Departed, L.A. Confidential, and Training Day to name a few — but almost all of them go about the issue in a disappointingly cinematic way. The corruption isn’t fundamentally engrained in the department: it’s the cause of some charismatic figure with seemingly infinite power, greed, or just classic movie villainy. Beat cops are either ignorant or foot soldiers of the evil Arch-Cop, nuance be damned.
Serpico is different: in the film, the NYPD is not nearly centralized enough to have such a disappointingly traditional take on corruption. Serpico encounters plenty of sympathetic cops on his serpentine quest for justice, many of whom are eventually shut down not by a unified conspiracy but by a distributed mantra: cops protect cops. What the department lacks in central control it makes up for in its dissemination of a singularly destructive ideology.
About halfway through the film, Serpico transfers to a department in the Bronx hoping to escape the payouts of his former precinct. He meets a friend there, and they have the following exchange:
“You’d never hurt another cop, would you Frank?”
“Well, it depends on what he did”
“That’s the wrong answer, Frank”
In most movies, this last line would be delivered with a chilling air of menace, and the seen would promptly end thereafter. The actor here says it congenially, with a smile; he’s not threatening Serpico, he’s just vocalizing a sentiment held throughout the police department.
Serpico comes no shortage of dirty cops throughout the film, but they’re almost all indistinguishable from one another — cogs in a system they’ve almost unconsciously joined. The real enemy isn’t one single person, it’s the departmental insularity, protectionism, and power inebriation.
Come to think of it, Serpico actually doesn’t even fit the definition of the kind of film I’m looking for — there’s no reform. Sure, the movie ends with Serpico giving a powerful testimony about the importance of impartial review of police corruption, but how is a viewer in June of 2020 really supposed to process such an ending? The NYPD of the 1960s and 70s was in a perpetual phalanx, ready to attack and defend on all sides and in all cases. Is there any reason to believe this has changed?
That’s not to say Frank Serpico didn’t do great work — he did— but if you think the end of the film is really the end of the story, I recommend you read the headline of this article and then look at who wrote it.
The film does not valorize every aspect of Serpico: he’s shown being plenty violent himself when dealing with suspects (though significantly less so than his fellow officers) and his self-righteous streak often leads him to needlessly steamroll over the women in his life. But in truth, it’s the fact that we see Serpico as a flawed human that makes the film a great one. It gives us hope that any individual can overcome the corruption of the system in which they exist.
What the film does not give us hope for is that organizations — namely police departments — can be expected to change without radical reinvention.
