The first installment in writer-director Steve McQueen’s five-film, Small Axe anthology, Mangrove begins by documenting the barrage of police brutality against London’s Caribbean community in the 1960s—a barrage albeit lightened by punctuations of communal joy and island music. Then, in its second half, the film settles into a courtroom drama recreating the trial of the “Mangrove Nine”: a group of protestors, all loosely affiliated with the Mangrove restaurant, who were arrested for inciting a riot. The events, as depicted here—of peaceful protestors against the police being attacked by those very police, then falsely accused—echoes, enragingly, what we saw time and again across the United States in the spring and summer of 2020. Across time and (white) spaces, the subjugation of people of color proves relentless. I wish Mangrove hadn’t made the head of the police, Frank Pulley (Sam Spruell), such a hissing villain (it underplays the systemic nature of the injustice at hand), but the other characters are richly envisioned and brought to life with gripping performances. Letitia Wright (Shuri in Black Panther) brings a fierce intelligence to Altheia Jones, a scientist and Black Panther member from Trinidad, and Malachi Kirby gives a sobering sense of conviction to Darcus Howe, another Black Panther member who more than capably represents himself in court. My favorite performance, though—indeed, one of the best of the year—comes from Shaun Parkes as Frank Crichlow, owner of the Mangrove. Frank occasionally loses his cool in the face of the continual police harassment, but he otherwise doesn’t say much (he mostly just wants to run his restaurant). And so Parkes has to work mainly through subtly shifting facial expressions that chart the growing transition within Frank, from annoyance to anger to activism. McQueen (Widows, 12 Years a Slave) honors this by dedicating the film’s climactic moment—the reading of all nine verdicts—to a single take that slowly closes in on Frank’s face. By making Frank the quiet focus of the movie, Mangrove becomes a document of both history and humanity—the story of a man rightly radicalized by the institutions oppressing him.
