Crime and punishment in ‘Solitary’ – ‘Fixer’ culture-clash drama

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LOS ANGELES, April 17, (RTRS): There’s little hope, but considerable insight, found in “Solitary,” Kristi Jacobson’s documentary about Wise County, Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison, a supermax facility where convicts are holed up for 23 hours a day in separate 8’-by-10’ cells. Shot over the course of a year, the film presents an unfiltered insider’s view of their colorless day-to-days, which are largely spent trying to stave off madness. Although its perspective is a tad too unbalanced, this unflinching look at inmate isolation will — after its premiere at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival — prove yet another sturdy addition to HBO’s nonfiction slate.

Jacobson utilizes a sparse score for glimpses of her setting’s surrounding rural landscape: a gray, misty locale where the closing of local coal mines motivated many to embrace employment at the penitentiary. The majority of “Solitary,” however, is awash in the unholy din of Red Onion, where inmates scream, wail, howl and bang about in endless expressions of fury and frustration. That cacophony does much to situate viewers in this particular, inhospitable space and is complemented by visual compositions that highlight the fences, bars, frosted windows, and blue steel doors that keep its occupants confined.

Intermittent text cards state that over 100,000 American inmates exist in solitary, and in Virginia, they get there by violating general-population prison rules (generally, for fighting or trying to escape). The length of their Red Onion residences are determined by their ability to behave and complete a re-acclimating Step-Down program.

Indefinite

Yet as Jacobson’s interviewees claim, their stays are in fact indefinite, and regulated by dictates that seem blind to their efforts to toe the line (for example, attempted escapees have no chance for leaving solitary). Solace, if attainable, comes in the form of television programs and outside-the-cell jobs, or via retreats into their own minds, where they can imagine a reality far freer than their own.

“Solitary” concentrates on a handful of Red Onion’s inhabitants, all of them locked away for serious crimes and resigned to spending the rest of their lives behind bars. They are, by and large, well-spoken and introspective, the latter born from the fact that their time is mostly spent by themselves, with only minimal contact with guards — and chats with other inmates through cells’ air vents — to mitigate their crushing seclusion.

When Randall, who’s serving two life sentences for murdering a gas-station attendant during a robbery, states that solitary “gets to you, and it hurts like hell,” he speaks for everyone in Red Onion, whose system primarily breeds rage, loneliness, and psychological issues verging on outright insanity.

Like Randall, abandoned by his parents to the foster system and his own criminal inclinations, head-tattooed Michael recounts his own upbringing enthralled by California gang culture. When Michael admits that he sometimes welcomes a physical altercation with guards — and when young corrections officer Jordan confesses likewise, saying the feelings those skirmishes inspire are akin to scoring a touchdown or hitting a home run — “Solitary” pinpoints how institutions such as Red Onion cultivate physical and emotional brutality in everyone who steps through its gates.

By not plumbing the rest of her interviewees’ backstories, or the warden and correctional officers’ lives, “Solitary” fails to present a more comprehensive cross-section of the dynamics at play at Red Onion. Still, refusing to shy away from harsh truths about both these inmates’ crimes, as well as their “caged animal” conditions, the film offers a complicated portrait of 21st-century crime and punishment — one in which the question of whether solitary confinement is unnecessarily and unproductively punitive, or a just penalty for extreme offenders, is left for the viewer to decide.

Very loosely inspired by his prior documentary about an Afghani guide to Western journalists (2009’s “Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi”), Ian Olds’ “The Fixer” is a culture-clash drama in which an exotic new arrival quickly becomes enmeshed in the less savory undersides of a rural Northern California town. Though less overtly comedic, this insinuatingly low-key tale may for some recall “Inherent Vice,” as it’s similarly a droll ostensible mystery whose investigation (let alone resolution) takes a back seat to the revealing eccentricities of characters and communities encountered en route. Presence of James Franco and Melissa Leo in supporting roles should boost prospects for a movie with considerable offbeat appeal, if few obvious commercial angles.

While the titular subject of Olds’ docu was kidnapped and ultimately executed by the Taleban for abetting foreign media, here fictive Osman (Dominic Rains) has made it out alive. Aspiring to become a professional journalist himself, he’s secured an asylum-status US visa thanks to Gabe (James Oliver Wheatley), the American reporter still covering his conflict-torn homeland. He’s welcomed by the latter’s weary local-cop mom Gloria (Leo), who provides a place to stay. But the job he thought he had with this coastal hippie-redneck hamlet’s newspaper turns out to be illusory; all they can offer is fifty bucks a week to write up the “police blotter” report.

It’s a consolation-prize beat Osman takes with naive seriousness, thinking he can somehow parlay sleuthing around this hinterland (where his only means of transport is hitching rides, or borrowing a bicycle) into a real career. His skills as a “fixer” — accustomed to empathetically infiltrating, extracting intel from and smoothing communication between opposing sides in the dangerous idealogical minefield of Afghanistan — make him confident he can penetrate the hidden corners of this seemingly simple, bucolic community.

His investigative impulses kick in once a shady local figure is found dead by the side of the road. Though this demise may be accidental, suspicion immediately falls on Lindsay (Franco), a short-tempered reliable screwup who had a grudge against the victim. But Osman, who has bonded with Lindsay after a bad initial encounter, hopes he can absolve his new friend.

That quest is complicated by numerous factors, all highlighting Osman’s outsider status. Used to dealing with life-or-death situations, he’s hapless at grasping the moral grey zones, contradictions and small deceptions taken for granted in this peculiar community. There may seem a world of difference between the orbits of wealthy New Age guru/actor type Carl (Tim Kniffin) — whose much younger “open relationship” girlfriend Sandra (Rachel Brosnahan) aims seduction beams at Osman — and unruly, meth-labby alleged crime family the Sokurov Brothers (its patriarch played by Thomas Jay Ryan). But in fact there’s considerable overlap, as underlined in successive climactic party scenes where both milieus prove to have plentiful good and bad points.The complex loyalties at work in each are simply unlike anything our protagonist has experienced before, though he thought he’d “seen it all.” Toward the end, one resident sums up the confounding prevailing logic by telling him “Here, everything’s always forgiven.” Even murder, sometimes.

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