Civil Brand

PREMIERE.COM REVIEW (posted 9/8/03)

Who knew that America's most cost-effective legal labor force has been right under our noses all along? Forget NAFTA. No need for Cambodian sweatshops. Big business need look no further than the private prison system, where companies build and operate jails while Uncle Sam picks up the bill. Rather than wasting time on a chain gang, inmates can put all that rehabilitative energy to work on an assembly line. The labor's cheap, the prisoners are accounted for, and the products can proudly be stamped "Made in the U.S.A." Everybody wins.

"We were high-priced stock down on Wall Street," explains Da Brat, who plays one of the women confined to Whitehead Correctional Institute in Civil Brand. "We were sewing ski coats for $1.50 a day to some woman in France who be paying like $1,000 for it next month." At least, they were until the women rose up and took down the system. There are no innocents here. These women acknowledge their crimes and want only to serve their time, but they deserve (and demand) fair treatment.

There's no question that Civil Brand has an ambitious premise, but it feels boxed in by the standard prison-movie formula: there's the usual imposing and inhumane warden, the infighting on the prison yard, the overly harsh stint in solitary confinement, and finally, the inevitable jailhouse insurrection or prison break. But even within these boundaries, a wide range of approaches is still possible, from the man-against-the-system movie (The Shawshank Redemption) to the social-commentary picture (such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, where it's the institution itself that's really called into question). Civil Brand nobly aspires to the latter category but loses its way among the movie's many political messages, defaulting to yet another tired retread.

Expect the usual smorgasbord of corruption and abuse, heightened by the fact that these prisoners are female. It doesn't help matters that director Neema Barnette, whose background is in television (she was the first African-American woman to direct a sitcom), takes the small-screen approach with the material. Unexpected angles, flash cuts, and arbitrary black-and-white shots may work on Showtime, but in theaters, the gimmickry shows. If Civil Brand hopes to raise awareness or instigate reform, what it really needs is a greater focus on character over convention — the quality that distinguished The Magdalene Sisters earlier this summer.

— Peter Debruge