Film Review of Prisoners (2013) By Benji Steinberg

Film Review of Prisoners (2013)

Benji Steinberg

P.risoners (2013) follows the disappearance of two young girls in Pennsylvania, and the subsequent police investigation. After bureaucratic failure, one of the fathers, Keller Dover, takes the interrogation into his own hands, capturing, and physically abusing one police suspect, Alex Jones, hoping for a confession. Prisoners is a film bound up with the concept of heritage.

First, it reveals the desperate and often immoral lengths that one will go to protect their physical progeny, as witnessed in the countless violent scenes of physical abuse when Keller Dover tries to beat a confession out of Alex Jones. Throughout the film, the audience is positioned in Keller’s state of uncertainty and confusion. We experience Keller’s decreasing confidence in his quest for his daughter, and his weakening conviction that Alex Jones is guilty. This journey concludes in the revelation that Alex Jones is a victim himself of his inheritance. Alex Jones turns out to be a victim of the very same religious cult responsible for the disappearance of the two girls. In this moment of helpless irony, Prisoners effectively sours the seemingly romantic saying, “I will do anything for you.” Keller’s willingness ‘to do anything’ for his daughter produces a severe injustice and incredible suffering.

Second, Prisoners reveals that we are totally defenceless against our inheritance – especially if we receive this at an early impressionable age. Alex Jones typifies this situation. While he is complicit in abducting the two girls his upbringing has taught him that there is nothing wrong with his actions. As part of the religious cult, Alex was indoctrinated to believe that young girls have to be committed to stop them from committing sin. Overall, maintaining one’s inheritance is an incredibly powerful force for action and, at the same time, can be incredibly blinding.

In essence, Prisoners shows how what we inherit and the attitude we have towards our progeny can be cruel. It can produce insidious effects. Prisoners in effect poses the question: What should we teach our progeny?

Spaces In Between

Arabella Broshan

One hand hangs on her mother’s, the other plastered against the glass.

She is alive in the remembering of this place. Metal spurs, golden rings,

iron helmets, igniting fantasies of their histories.

Whose foot had moulded the iron, whose horseflesh had it urged.

Who bore the heavy rings, were they sung, too loose, or just right.

Whose eyes had peered through those slits, whose dreams had its weight protected.

She didn’t see the artefact in them. There was a space for humanity in them.

Who might once have filled it?

A tug on her arm, made harsher by the sharpness of a gemstone ring,

pulls feet in plastic shoes and jolts the silver pins in her hair.

Her enlivening hand is peeled unstuck.

The Spanish Language in West Side Story (2021)

Morgan Maruthiah

West Side Story is a phenomenal musical. The compositional mastery of Leonard Bernstein meets the eloquent lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, against the backdrop of the ageless narrative of Romeo and Juliet. Its success has been felt both on stage and screen; the 1961 film adaptation won 10 of its 11 nominated Academy Awards. As well as a spectacular aesthetic work, it prominently addresses contemporary issues that tend to be sidelined on Broadway, namely: xenophobia, racism, gentrification, generational poverty, and wealth inequality – as visible in the 1950s as they are today.

In fact, West Side Story is my second-favourite musical. The fault that I find in West Side Story is, unfortunately, an ever-present one: that is, the use of (artificial) Spanish-inflected English by Puerto Rican characters, both in speech and song. I have never been able to shake the sense of awkwardness I get when listening to four Puerto Ricans speaking English in private with variably-convincing Spanish accents. In the 1961 film, non-Hispanic actors, wearing makeup in order to appear darker-skinned, played two of the most prominent Puerto Rican roles: Natalie Wood as Maria and George Chakiris as Bernardo.

By its very nature, a Broadway musical – let alone a production from the tail-end of the 1950s – will always be written for a predominantly English-speaking audience. This offers food for thought regarding language other than the lingua franca in earlier musical productions. Audiences do not bat an eyelid when the Hebrew slaves of Babylon in Verdi’s Nabucco sing their impassioned cry in Italian. More pertinently, singers in Bizet’s Carmen adopt a Spanish-inflected French, with a rolled R. It is difficult to find a performance of the famous ‘Toreador Song’, which does not incorporate an alveolar trill, perhaps indicating that the “Spanish accent” has crossed the line into a ‘stylistic element’.

The treatment of this matter in the West Side Story film adaptation of 2021 fortunately reflects the fact that sixty years have passed. This is perhaps in more appropriate recognition of the enormous (and growing) presence of the Spanish language within the USA, the Spanishspeaking population of which is second in size only to Mexico. The new production includes extended instances of Spanish dialogue without the use of subtitles, an addition which had first appeared in the 2009 Broadway revival.

Principally, this change adds vigour and depth to scenes involving Puerto Rican characters. Spanish lines are not merely token phrases added for flavour, but meaningful dialogue that is delivered naturally and integrated into the plot seamlessly. English phrases – included for broader audience comprehension – are delivered almost as afterthoughts following Spanish dialogue. The result is communication which is believable and, importantly, relatable to an increasingly-multicultural western world of increasingly-bilingual households.

Director Steven Spielberg’s claim that English subtitles would devalue the Spanish language, has garnered both applause and criticism. Positing that the 2021 production “doesn’t go far enough” in addressing the representational shortcomings of West Side Story, Sofia Andrade of Slate suggests that the lack of subtitles leaves

audiences with no choice but to sympathise with white characters, thus viewing the Puerto Ricans through the xenophobic eyes of the Jets. This, however, neglects the sensibility of the audience; the Jets are characterised as repulsive and unsympathetic in far more explicit ways than any implied Anglophone solidarity could undo (Mike Faist’s portrayal of a particularly savage Riff comes to mind). On the contrary, the lack of subtitles allows for a more intimate connection with the Puerto Rican characters. We see into the private lives of Maria, Anita, Bernardo and Chino as neither accented caricatures (as in the original) nor distant, ‘foreign’ subjects (as subtitles would imply).

When Puerto Rican characters do speak English, it is generally either at the command of (English-speaking) authorities, or at the request of other recent immigrants who wish to assimilate. Anxieties regarding assimilation into an Anglophone American culture have always been central to the plot of West Side Story. perhaps most strikingly-expressed in the climactic line of the tune ‘America’: “‘Life is alright in America / ‘If you’re all-white in America’”. With the new production’s inclusion of Spanish dialogue, this conflict enters the arena of speech. Anita and Bernardo’s conflicting experiences regarding the ‘American Dream’ become all the more real as they fluctuate between the languages of two homes. External pressure and internal desires to speak English subtly, but very effectively, convey the issue of assimilation through dialogue.

With the release of the 2021 production of West Side Story, the Puerto Rican characters finally go beyond “momentito” and “te amo”. Whether a small step or a giant leap, this choice is certainly moving in the right direction in terms of representation. However, I have attempted to limit myself to a brief discussion of the aesthetic qualities of this linguistic change. In this regard, the engagement with Spanish has served to deepen significant plot elements. On the whole, West Side Story benefits immensely, and one of the few tarnishes on this extraordinary musical begins to fade.