Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
I am so cynical now. Blame it on
movies. Years ago I might have seen a documentary like Katie
Dellamaggiore's BROOKLYN CASTLE and written a glowing review
about how much it elevates the spirit, restores your faith, turns
darkness to light, removes waxy buildup, helps shed those annoying
pounds etc. Now I just think this true inner-city school nonfiction
is merely a promo-preview-fundraiser for the MAIN big-studio product.
You know, a theatrical movie adaptation
telling much the same story - a teacher'n'the hood deal in which a
plain-jane Nice White Lady (Charlize Theron, Kate Bosworth, Jennifer
Love Hewitt, Beyonce with Caucasian makeup) in a dull sweater vest
comes to some ghetto educational facility and uses the wonder of
learning, or something, to turn at-risk young lives around and save
the kidz from the streetz. Same thing happened to SMALL WONDERS
(alias FIDDLEFEST), a Cleveland International Film Festival
favorite that, a few years later, wound up being made into a scripted
uplifter called MUSIC OF THE HEART (which I confess inordinate
fondness for mainly because it's one of Wes Craven's atypical
non-horror directing jobs). Meanwhile BROOKLYN CASTLE is here
for as many crowd-pleasing points as a documentary reasonably can be.
The setting of BROOKLYN CASTLE
is IS (Intermediate School) 318, a junior-high facility educating a
lot of kids in high-poverty households in the Bedford-Stuyvesent
neighborhood of NYC. For reasons never explained, the Chess Club at
IS 318 really took off, and now not only is it “cool” to be a
chess kid in these hallways, but IS 318 leads all junior-high chess
clubs in competitions across the country. This is no small thing, as
a chess scholarship can be the ticket to a bright future for the
underprivileged kids.
We meet assorted Chess Club members:
Rochelle bids to be first black American female chess Master, but she
can't let up on her other academic studies, either. Pobo, son of
African immigrants, is not only a chess player but also a candidate
for class president. He runs as "Pobama" on a campaign
promising "hope" (that detail's getting out of date pretty
fast). Justus and Patrick are chess players a little less sure of
themselves or their games, and it reflects in their troubled personal
lives.
The Wall Street collapse of 2008 (which
it occurs to me I haven't heard any presidential candidates talk
about how they're planning to avoid a second one. Remember how many
politicos talked about going to any lengths to prevent another 9/11?
But stopping another Wall Street meltdown? No big priority. Like
finding bin Laden wasn't important to Bush, I guess) shakes the NYC
educational system. Budget cuts hitting IS 318 endanger both the
marching band...and the celebrated Chess Club and the kids who rely
upon it.
But [SPOILER ALERT, YEAH RIGHT] it all
ends joyously, with come-from-behind victories, restored
self-esteem/funding, and a student chess match in Ohio (a short one,
in Columbus, sorry). Even the lady teachers who coach the young Chess
Club members are Hollywood slim and Jessica Chastain-pretty. If a
documentary could have a narrative and a conclusion chosen by
audience focus-groups, this would be it.
One thing this movie doesn't do is try
to inform non-chess playing viewers on the intimate details of the
game. The upside is no time squandered sweating out moves and
counter-moves to various squares, rather meaningless to those of us
unfortunate to be chess-illiterates. Still, I'm sure those who do
know their knights from their pawns might find this as spellbinding
as, well, SPELLBOUND, the spelling-bee documentary that had me
riveted.
Give it a few years and BROOKLYN
CASTLE will likely be rebooted, with a Denzel or a Meryl, a
hip-hop soundtrack featuring an Oscar-bait pop-tune, and a rote
script with at least six writers credited (twice as many uncredited),
and a purely off-the-rack scene where the worried teacher meets a
chess kid’s parents at the ER at night following a drive-by
(nothing the likes of which happens here). The title? I don't know,
how about CASTLE BROOKLYN? Meanwhile don’t let my slightly
jaded POV checkmate your seeing this. (3 out of 4 stars)
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