Brawl in Cell Block 99

Director: S. Craig Zahler

Cast: Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Carpenter, Don Johnson, Marc Blucas, Udo Kier, Clark Johnson

Year: 2017

Country: USA

Author Review: Roberto Matteucci

"You should aim higher with the desires."

In August of 1971, Professor Philip Zimbardo conducted stimulating research into behaviour in a prison. The research is known with the name of Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) from the name of the University of Palo Alto. With an announcement in a newspaper, twenty-four university students - belonging to a middle class, of a good cultural level and without psychopathology - were recruited after a selection. How did the experimentation work? In the undergrounds of the university, a prison was predisposed as those real. As in a role-playing game, the students were casually divided between prisoners and jailers. It was a fiction, but the guys had to participate actively respecting the rules and behaviours. The experiment had to last two weeks but after six days it was closed. The reason was a loss of control of the boys. There was a total disintegration of the personality with the presence of harmful and dangerous attitudes. Immediately the guinea pigs entered their roles, showing a real participation in their being the prisoner or the guards. The guards began to have oppressive and sadistic behaviours while the prisoners became passive and masochistic. The teachers were surprised to watch among students an individual and collective disintegration, through the real abuse of the warders, both by day and even by night, when the experiment was to be suspended. The gratuitous violence increased and the prisoners accepted them without rebelling.

These are prisons, places of arrogance where the inmates lose control of their personal acts, to make those of the group prevailed. It means there is a terrible identification between their actions and those of the category to which they belong. The result was quite predictable. in fact, prisons have never been pleasant and peaceful places, inside the prison, violence has always prevailed. However, the consequences of the study were striking.

Nevertheless, part of the study misses a grouping. In the prisons, there are two fundamental classifications: guards and prisoners. Often, however, even the prisoners break into two subgroups: one violent, as and perhaps more than the jailers, and the other whose submission increases until being crushed by the cruelty and inhumanity of both groups.

Of these behaviours, the cinema is occupied with very beautiful stories. The American director S. Craig Zahler has used this principle, in the film Brawl in Cell Block 99, presented at the 74th International Venice Film Festival.

He exalted the violence inside the walls in an American penitentiary. Achieving the result was helped by a lusty and vigorous Vince Vaughn, who played the role of a vigorous troglodyte but sincerely good and in love, but his best quality is his strong courage.

This psychological description of the character is born in the beautiful initial scene. Bradley is all muscle and little brain, one day he is fired in the trunk. It is an unlucky day because when he comes home he finds his wife in bed with another man. Everyone expects a furious, bad reaction, and in fact, behaves like that. But there is a surprise, does not discharge the anger against his wife or the lover. The object of his hydrophobia is their poor car. Suddenly Bradley disassembles the car with his hands, punching the car piece by piece. He succeeds calmly, decisively, ferociously, angrily as if he were Hulk. The result is both an old wreck and a psychological explanation of the character.

The granitic Vaugh tells us: "... he discovers that there is this betrayal and I think he says a lot about the character. He has this great anger in him, that he would like to discharge. But it's strange and he certainly does not want to be violent towards her, he does not want to be that kind of person. So he leaves the house when he can not control himself and throws all his anger against the car. And indeed, during the reading of the script, it was the scene that more I wanted to shoot. Especially for the conversation that Bradley and Lauren have after: I found it surprising that he, in some way, take his responsibilities. And I think I fell in love with the character, how he was able to forgive Lauren, to feel empathy, even to want to look at and build something, each accepting their own faults. He moved me. " (i)

And in fact, we feel empathy for Bradley even when after a few months we see him working for a drug dealer. It seems the events get positive, with the wife had made peace and she got pregnant. Therefore he needs a job and profitable. They bought a beautiful house and have money to spend. But during a night clash between gangs, he is arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison.

He was imprisoned, justly, in the cell, but for some strange reasons, he was involved in a dirty matter to save his wife. It is a question to be resolved in prison, where a battle begins between prisoners and policemen, and among the same inmates.

If in the experiment of SPE the inhabitants of the fake prison were chosen among a: “ … group of psychologically healthy, normal college students ...” and it was “ … dramatically transformed in the course of six days spent in a prison-like environment ...” (ii) we can imagine what happens in an authentic prison, with real criminals, almost always quarrelsome, aggressive, psychopathic and bad, with nothing to lose.

The same must think the director because it begins an exaggerated, inflated, drugged, unbridled escalation but at the same time cathartic and liberating. Bradley is unleashed in a merciless war, with a violence so ruthless and cruel to leave incredulous. The identification with Bradley excites us to applaud when he tears off the head to another prisoner; to be enthusiastic about a brutal act perhaps means that we too are part of the Stanford experiment?

Bradley is the most well-finished character, with the ascetic and contradictory large cross tattooed on the nape. It is the first image seen when Bradley gets out of the car in the first scene.

The author uses many shots from below, from behind, starting from the voluminous nape. The chiaroscuro tones serve to magnify the height and the musculature out of measure. Artificial light is needed in an enclosed space, as a penitentiary must be.

Bradley is so big as to fill the frame by himself but it's not just muscles, actually, the director explains to us in the film: "There's love, redemption, and managing physical and emotional pain is a constant in the film" (iii) and in fact it will be love to win despite a head kicked off and left in a squat toilet.

(i) http://www.theitalianreve.com/it/intervista-brawl-in-cell-block-99/

(ii) http://www.csdp.org/research/haney_apa.pdf

(iii) http://www.theitalianreve.com/it/intervista-brawl-in-cell-block-99/