Is Anyone Watching “Sing Sing”?

A young man in a fedora vigorously shook his head side-to-side. He certainly hadn’t seen it. Everyone else at the table joined him.

So, several minutes later, did Brendan Murray, a senior communication studies major seated by the windows of the Howard Gittis Student Center. 

“No, I haven’t,” Murray said — then, curiosity piqued, he refired his laptop and began pecking away. “Should I?” he wondered.

Movie critics have some thoughts to share. Fletcher Peters of The Daily Beast called “Sing Sing,” a 107-minute drama about the notorious New York prison’s theater troupe, “the first total triumph of the year.” More than that, she joked Shakespeare ought to consider handing over his laurels to its creators. Variety’s Clayton Davis predicted Oscar acting nods for both its stars, Clarence Macklin and Temple alumnus Colman Domingo.

A laundry list of celebrities were so smitten with “Sing Sing” that they teamed up with AMC to offer curious moviegoers free tickets: Bette Midler. Bowen Yang. Joe Tsai, with the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty in tow. 

Its story — of men imprisoned for reasons serious and dubious, searching for goodness and beauty behind bars — arrived as a counterbalance to a time when national politicians compared accused criminals to Hannibal Lecter and the country’s paranoia far outpaced actual crime statistics.

In that sense, “Sing Sing” boasts a critically acclaimed doppelganger: 1995’s “The Shawshank Redemption,” a silver-screen portrait of a wrongly accused inmate who manages to carve a figurative and literal place for himself out of the cell. “Shawshank” arrived as a pinprick of clarity at the climax of another law-and-order craze — and, for its attempt to humanize the incarcerated, suffered its share of dings from reviewers.

And yet, if a great movie drops into theaters and no one sees it, can it be “Shawshank” for the “skibidi” generation — “important and vital,” in Midler’s words?

Though “Sing Sing” had premiered to thunderous applause at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, A24 had opted for a cautious release. First, there would be a memory-foam-soft launch in the nation’s two largest cities, New York and Los Angeles. Then a handful more, if those initial showings proved successful. Audiences alone could force a wide release by keeping demand high. Essentially, a promotional I.V. drip.

The week I heard about it, the closest “Sing Sing” theater to Philadelphia was the Angelika Film Center in Manhattan, at the edge of NYU’s campus. There was a highway ride to Jersey City, a PATH commuter train from Jersey City to the World Trade Center, and — finally — the 5 to Bleecker Street station, in the shadow of the enormous billboard advertising Ralph Lauren’s Olympic jackets.

Showtime was past 10 p.m. Zeus-sized renderings of Anthony Edwards and Coco Gauff scrutinized us as we filed into the aging cinematic hideaway. Inside, it was our turn to stare, at Domingo and his costars as they cast the world of Sing Sing in dreamlike 16-millimeter relief.

“Sing Sing” has a plot, a chronological progression. There are twists and surprises, pleasant and otherwise. Still, it’s impossible to truly spoil. Many of the actors, including Maclin, had once been inmates themselves. Each moment they spend on screen stresses the duality between the world they yearn to transcend and all the ways they already do — and the most powerful scenes, rather than ushering forth the plot, simply magnify the distance between the characters’ souls and their surroundings.

There are no explosions. The comedy is high-minded, subtle and street-smart, all at once — which is to say, the audience laughed at jokes in New York that drew silence in Philadelphia weeks later, and vice-versa. In all the ways movies often aren’t, “Sing Sing” was truly lifelike.

In his 2022 commentary on Russian folk literature, George Saunders wrote that randomness is the line between fact and fiction. Every detail of a good story moves the plot along, argued Saunders, a professor of creative writing at Syracuse University. Real life? Not so much.

In the same way, artistic media — movies and TV — offer an incomplete picture of what goes on in prison, said Temple criminal justice professor Jason Gravel.

“The reality is, it’s a lot more boring than what you see on movies,” said Gravel, who has not seen “Sing Sing.” 

Hierarchies and organized conflicts are tough to maintain since their key figures occasionally die, transfer or walk free. Extracurriculars, like the theater program at the real-life “Sing Sing,” proliferate at prisons across the country as a way to puncture the stillness.

But mundanity makes for terrible cinema. Only recently did the movie business start to think differently about the picture it paints of incarceration — and, Gravel added, the incarcerated.

Hollywood’s first flirtation with the themes of race and crime also happened to be its first big-budget blockbuster, D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.” There, Black Americans were smeared as ignorant, unchaste brutes, unfit for freedom or self-government. The civil rights advances of Reconstruction were decried as a tragedy. And the Ku Klux Klan, now understood to be a domestic terror organization, were feted in Griffith’s production as guardians of white rule and womanhood.

“Birth of a Nation” hit theaters in 1915 amid great protest and controversy. Twenty years later, “Gone With the Wind” promoted the same notions — painting the picture of a homeostatic South, suddenly dominated by roving gangs of dark-skinned crooks at slavery’s end.

Both productions served as linchpins in white supremacists’ push to rewrite the history of the region. But Temple film professor Chris Fernando, who teaches a course titled “Race and Ethnicity in the Cinematic Arts,” believes they were less drivers of racist revisionism than windows into it.

“These problems didn’t need the movies to be problems,” said Fernando, who has also not seen “Sing Sing.”“And Americans didn’t need the movies to give them permission to be racist.”

But even as the nation evolved and Lost Cause fantasies faded from the media, racialized visions of crime didn’t. Well into the 21st century, Hollywood and TV news fed Americans a steady diet of danger-sensationalism, warping their sense of violence’s origins and antidotes. 

Movies like “The Shawshank Redemption” were far from the norm, logs in a river of content reinforcing America’s sense that some of its own people were natural-born “super-predators.” Only after movements like #OscarsSoWhite and #BlackLivesMatter did cinema appear to undergo serious change, Fernando said — the changes that made a movie like “Sing Sing” possible.

Texas prisons banned Toni Morrison’s “Paradise” from its libraries from 1998 to 2001, fearing that its allegory of social exclusion would spark a riot or a strike. The state told the New York Times in 2009 they feared its racial slurs. Morrison hung the edict, whatever it said, from her wall as a badge of honor.

There are many reasons why “Sing Sing,” for all the buzz from critics, grossed only $394,204 through Labor Day weekend. But one might be its staggered, small-scale release: It only lasted a weekend in suburban Philadelphia’s theaters — and, coincidentally, still hasn’t made it to the Lone Star State.

Sophomore film major Casey Boyack was perusing the Internet for screenings at the Philadelphia Film Center in Old City when she came across “Sing Sing” for the first time. It looked interesting enough, she said, but wasn’t sure she actually wanted to watch — she wasn’t sure she could easily reach the PFC without a car.

“Maybe I’ll go down and see it,” Boyack said. “I’m more likely to do it, now that you’ve brought it up.”