Pubdate: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 Source: Baltimore Sun (MD) Copyright: 2000 The Baltimore Sun, a Times Mirror Newspaper. Contact: http://www.sunspot.net/ Forum: http://www.sunspot.net/cgi-bin/ultbb/Ultimate.cgi?actionintro Author: David Zurawik, Sun Television Critic EYE OF THE NEEDLE Last summer a small party was held to welcome the cast and crew arriving in Baltimore for the filming of "The Corner." As partygoers settled in at the stables of the Evergreen House mansion on North Charles Street, David Simon, the co-writer-and-executive producer of the series, moved outside into the night and sat on steep stone stairs looking down on the scene. "Goals?" he said in answer to my question. "I can tell you a couple of them: To be subversive in telling more truth about the people on the Corner than television probably wants to know; to humanize instead of demonizing these people. And to do that in a way that HBO can be OK with it." What Simon, co-writer David Mills and director Charles S. Dutton have delivered to HBO eight months later is far better than OK. They have made landmark television -- a film that people will buzz about in coming days for the powerful stories it tells and for the remarkable sociology that future generations will study. "The Corner" turns the TV police drama on its head. It shows us the world from the point of view of the people that series like "NYPD Blue" and even "Homicide: Life on the Street" have helped teach us to despise - drug addicts and drug dealers in cities like Baltimore. And it does so with an eloquence that will make some viewers care about that world in ways they never thought possible. American television does not get any better than HBO. But you have to reach beyond even such HBO triumphs as the 1997 film, "The Tuskeegee Airmen," to find an apt comparison to "The Corner." It is made of the same rare stuff as such watershed works of social conscience as "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," the Depression-era study of Appalachian poor by James Agee and Walker Evans, and Edward R. Murrow's 1960 CBS documentary on migrant workers, "Harvest of Shame." The beginning "The Corner," which is based on the nonfiction book of the same title by Simon and former police detective Edward Burns, opens like a Murrow documentary: Dutton standing on a bombed-out Baltimore street corner speaking directly to the camera. "I'm Charles S. Dutton. Last summer, I came back here to Baltimore, Maryland, to film a story about life on the Corner," he begins. "I grew up and hung out on a corner just like this one, not too far from here, a corner like thousands of others across the country," continues Dutton, whose personal journey from jail (the Maryland State Penitentiary for killing a man in a fight) to Yale (graduate study at the Yale School of Drama) to Broadway and Hollywood has been chronicled many times in these pages. "The contradiction of it is this," he says. "On the one hand, the Corner pulsates with life - the energy of human beings trying to make it to the next day. But also it's a place of death, be it the slow death of addiction or the suddenness of gunshots. This film is the true story of men, women and children living in the midst of the drug trade. Their voices are too rarely heard." The opening credits take us from documentary to docudrama as we meet Gary McCullough, played with an exquisite vulnerability by T. K. Carter ("A Rage in Harlem"). The choice of opening on McCullough, one of the three people at the film's center, is one of many wise decisions made by Simon and his colleagues. At the intersection of North Monroe and West Fayette streets, dealers shout out, like carnival barkers, the brand name of the heroin or cocaine they're pushing to an endless parade of walk-up and drive-through buyers. In this hellish cauldron of death and drugs, 34-year-old McCullough is the character most like us, the mainly middle-class audience that subscribes to HBO. He is the most sympathetic and, in many ways, the one who cuts hardest against the TV stereotypes of drug fiends. Simon calls him "the soul of the series." Before his addiction to heroin, which started four years earlier, McCullough was a promising young entrepreneur holding down a day job as a supervisor at Bethlehem Steel and a night job as a security guard. He also had his own small company that rehabbed rowhouses, and a stock portfolio that he had managed to run up to $150,000. McCullough is an intelligent, decent and sensitive man who you could easily imagine running a government agency or a business. Instead, he is chasing an increasingly elusive heroin high seven days a week. As we meet him, he's going down, down, down, and his lingering sense of decency only makes him less likely to survive the Corner. The other two major stories in the series belong to Fran Boyd, McCullough's estranged wife, and DeAndre McCullough, their 15-year-old son. Boyd, played by Khandi Alexander ("ER"), is also a junkie. DeAndre, played by Sean Nelson ("The Wood"), is an up-and-coming "corner boy," out on the street selling vials of cocaine, learning the game from a supplier named Bugsy. He's also acquiring a taste for what he sells. With its focus on these three, "The Corner" is very much a family drama. But that is one of several familiar television narratives it ultimately subverts. This isn't "The Waltons"; you've never seen this kind of family on TV before. Of the six hours, the best is the finale, "Everyman's Blues," which opens with the birth of a baby and Thanksgiving dinner with Fran's family - two rare moments of joy and grace, a cease-fire of sorts amid all the suffering. But everything that makes this miniseries great is there to see in Sunday's first hour, titled "Gary's Blues." Setting the scene In the opening moments, the camera follows McCullough down the street as he ducks into a Korean grocery store, where he buys a cigarette -- yes, one cigarette -- for which he pays 25 cents. They are cheaper by the pack, of course, but every dollar a dope addict has goes to dope. We quickly learn that a different economic model operates on the corner of Fayette and Monroe. This is the same store, we discover, that a young McCullough worked in some 25 years beforewhen it was owned by the Lemlers, a Jewish couple. Jews, Koreans and African-Americans are pitted one against the other, each group exploiting and inflicting pain on the other. This is a film steeped in ethnicity, tribalism and class warfare. Instead of the camera following McCullough into the store, it stops on the doorstep. And, while McCullough is inside, director Dutton and cinematographer Ivan Strasburg give us a slow 360 degree look at the Corner, firmly establishing the look and point of view of the series (which was actually filmed at East Oliver and Montford Streets for logistical reasons having to do with the crew being based in Fells Point). What we see is a hopelessly bleak urban landscape of boarded-up buildings, broken windows, graffiti-spiked walls and trash-filled lots. A boy who looks no older than 8 stands in the middle of the street and throws bottle after bottle against a concrete wall until shards of glass cover the sidewalk like a sheet of ice. There is not a tree in sight. This should be Berlin after World War II, or maybe Beirut in the 1980s, or sections of Belfast in the '90s. But, sadly, this is part of Baltimore today. And, when the police swoop down in sometimes brutal, usually meaningless raids, we don't see it from the network cop drama point of view, but rather that of the boys, men and women being slammed up against the wall. Many of them are weak, shaky, badly diseased addicts, not the suppliers getting rich off the residents' misery and living several steps removed from these exercises in urban policing. For American TV, this point of view is revolutionary. It's the same point of view feature films like "In the Name of the Father," which is sympathetic to the Irish Republican Army, use to show us life in Belfast. In fact, a number of scenes that show corner boys and other residents scrambling from police down warren-like alleys seem to have been inspired by such films. The larger point, perhaps, given the current real-life debate over new models of policing here, is that Baltimore City police officers and detectives are not the good guys they were in Simon's "Homicide." Instead, they most resemble an occupying army that, like the U.S. Army in Vietnam, doesn't really hold the ground that the generals and their public relations staffs want us to think it holds. And, yet, in this war zone there is tremendous humanity, with moments of compassion and even tenderness. A moment of tenderness In one such moment Sunday, we enter an abandoned, trashed-out rowhouse without heat or electricity. The place serves as a shooting gallery for a group of addicts that viewers will come to know very well. One by one, the addicts line up before a woman named Rita (Robin Michelle McClamb), who has open sores on her face and oozing abscesses on her arms. But Rita has a skill that's highly valued on Fayette Street: She can find a vein with a needle. And, so, each user gives Rita some of his or her dope in return for her injecting them. The last man in line, Fat Curt (Clarke Peters), who's been an addict for more than 25 years, has no usable veins in his arms or legs. When his turn comes, he kneels before Rita, who, like a high priestess, sits in a chair lit only by a ring of flickering candles. She tenderly takes his head, places it on her lap and turns it sideways to expose a large vein on the side of his neck. And then she eases the needle into that vein as she gently strokes his head. Of the hundreds of thousands of images that have passed before my eyes as a television critic, that tableau with Rita and Curt in candlelight is one of the most stunning, perfectly framed and evocative I have ever seen. "The Corner" is filled with such remarkable imagery, especially in the shooting galleries where Dutton and Strasburg have the addicts appearing and disappearing in the shadows like wraiths gliding through descending rings of hell. But be warned, like most accounts of hell, "The Corner" is graphic, profane and given to moments of incredible violence. It is not for everyone. Though, like "The Sopranos" -- which is also graphic, profane and violent - -- the premium cable world of HBO is the place where such adult fare definitely belongs. There are other ways in which I suspect that "The Corner" is not going to be for everyone, even though in each of these ways it can tell us something important about our society. While the series includes characters who leave the Corner and drugs behind, its commitment to documentary truth precludes the kind of neatly satisfying story lines that TV drama has taught us to expect. As a result, some viewers might feel it's too static. Personally, I'll take the truth, as static and ambiguous as it might often be. Expectations And then there's the matter of cultural conditioning. Our popular culture has been demonizing people of color since the 17th century when some of the New World's first European settlers penned captivity narratives about life among the "savages." In addition, one of the primary ways our 20th century culture excuses the excesses of capitalism is by dehumanizing poor people in the stories it tells. Add to that some three decades of rhetoric from government officials about a "war on drugs" with these folks as the enemy, and you are looking up a mighty steep hill in terms of viewer sympathy for the poor, black drug addicts at the center of this story. As powerful as "The Corner" is, for some viewers six hours of great TV is simply not going to dent what a lifetime of conditioning has taught many of us, black and white, to believe about the urban underclass. But, in the end, that's exactly what makes the corner of Fayette and Monroe such an important place to visit for the next six weeks. Let "The Corner" into your living room, and it just might change the way you see the world. - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D