‘American Son’ Struggles Off Stage

Christopher Demos-Brown’s acclaimed play swaps the stage for the screen in ‘American Son’ (2019). A single-set Netflix drama starring Kerry Washington and Steven Pasquale, who reprise their roles as Kendra and Scott, an interracial couple desperately awaiting news of their missing son Jamal.

Beginning with Kendra frantically attempting to reach Jamal on a mobile phone interspersed with flashbacks of a serious fight between the two of them the night before, ‘American Son’ immediately introduces an air of anxiety while viewers with at least one eye on current affairs quickly infer the source of her fear as it becomes apparent that her son’s vehicle was involved in a police incident.

As the lives and deaths of Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin tragically attest, black sons and police officers can be a deadly combination. This reality is underscored by young police officer Larkin, whose racist questioning disregards the fact that Jamal is a talented student with no priors and instead inquires about his street names, tattoos and youthful infractions before misquoting Emily Dickinson and bumbling through his vague appreciation of The Big Six.

Given the ongoing and justified acrimony many African Americans feel towards an often racist, mostly white police force whose racial profiling has proven lethal, Larkin’s characterisation as casually discriminatory is as unsurprising as his misogyny when he mistakes Kendra’s husband for her superior and summarily calls her a b*tch and an angry black woman.

For those tuning in from a place of social conscience, ‘American Son’ plays like a series of dramatised talking points everyone has heard before but may perhaps do well to hear again. Heavy on dialogue, yelled arguments and histrionics, ‘American Son’ loses some of its poignancy in its inability to scale down the drama for the screen.

Set primarily in one room with four characters moving in and out of the space expounding on actions outside the arena, the film looks, sounds and feels like a theatre production when the medium calls for some subtlety.

Washington, for her part, has one setting. Understandably hurt by her failed marriage, exhausted and discouraged by her attempts to protect her black son while also doing her utmost to give him the world, Kendra is overwrought, shrill and, yes, angry.

This is juxtaposed with her white and placating FBI husband who walks in late, gets far more information from the police officer than Kendra was offered and sprinkles loaded terms and blatant racism into conversations with his wife, which renders their union somewhat far-fetched. (Kendra is a doctor of psychology, Scott a cop who wishes his son would stop dressing like a ‘gangsta’ and by this he means cornrows and low-slung jeans.)

Literal and sobering, ‘American Son’ has noble intentions but the film struggles off stage and is plagued by mixed messaging that seems to alternate between so-called crying black victimhood, advising caution because black people are often victims of racism and defending trigger-happy police officers in the name of protocol.

Stream this if you need a recap on why we need #BlackLivesMatter and some particularly affecting insights into why African American mothers with black sons may struggle to sleep at night.

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