“Street Fight” Directed by Marshall Curry
Marshall Curry Productions LLC The 2002 mayoral election
in Newark, N.J. was not a big concern for the average Californian,
or even the average American. But “Street Fight,”
Marshall Curry’s Academy Award-nominated documentary, creates
suspense from a distance, turning “Who cares?” into a
frantic “Who wins?!” as the audience gets sucked into
the trenches. The hero of the documentary is Cory Booker, a young
Yale Law School graduate who wants to turn the crime-ridden and
impoverished city around by defeating the four-time incumbent
mayor, Sharpe James. The race becomes dangerously close as James,
with the control and influence he has built up over his long
political career, threatens Booker supporters ““ including
Curry, who has to repeatedly declare his right to freedom of the
press, sometimes with police violence ““ and shuts down their
businesses. James’s popularity shows how politicians can take
advantage of an ignorant public. Both candidates are black
Democrats, but that doesn’t stop James from attacking Booker
by calling him a white Republican who is “conspiring with the
Jews to take over the city.” Such anti-Semitism, coupled with
the idea that Booker’s identity as a black man can be
stripped away by an Ivy League education, is disturbing, and even
more so when these become concerns of the sizeable black population
in Newark. The audience sees that Booker is clearly the better man,
and that the citizens who do not support Booker are being fed
““ at times literally, as Booker learns quickly not to
underestimate the power of free food ““ by the James campaign.
Since both Booker and James are Democrats, partisan politics take a
welcome backseat after angry, Republican-vilifying films, such as
those from Michael Moore. Curry, like Moore, narrates his film,
although he does so from behind the camera, and with unobtrusive
comments. Curry too has a message, but not an angry one. He focuses
on the problems of Newark and the candidates rather than his own
voice. “Street Fight” is a biased film ““ siding
with Booker ““ but most of us do not hesitate to take this
side because Newark politics do not directly affect our lives.
Curry stays on a local level, resisting the urge to explicitly
declare Newark a microcosm of all that is awful about the United
States, thereby showing that a political documentary does not have
to be negative to get a point across. “Street Fight”
doesn’t attack its audience with guilt or shame but fills us
with concern for the distant city’s fate and the hope that
when an election closer to home rolls around, the better candidate
will be as easy to spot.
“”mdash; Amy Crocker