'Sinners' Is Weird, Messy, And Horny, And I Loved Every Second Of It.
Ryan Coogler proves that he doesn't need valuable IP to make a beautiful popcorn blockbuster.
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Someone on Twitter the other day pointed out that Ryan Coogler and Quentin Tarantino’s career box office numbers were basically tied, at $1.2 billion apiece. That’s either impressive for Coogler, a 38-year-old with five feature theatrical releases to his name (vs. 62-year-old Tarantino’s nine), or slightly unfair given that the bulk of Coogler’s filmography consists of IP-driven movies (one in the Rocky series — Creed — and two Black Panther movies for the MCU).
It’s an imperfect comparison for any number of reason, but I mention anyway because Sinners, Coogler’s first non-IP feature as a big-name filmmaker, does feel almost uncannily like him playing around in Tarantino’s sandbox. Much like The Holdovers felt a bit like Alexander Payne doing a Wes Anderson cover that was better than Wes Anderson, Sinners feels a lot like a bigger, better From Dusk Till Dawn — with period trappings and at least a wink towards social commentary. Oh, and it’s also kind of a musical. It’s weird and ambitious and wonderful, and Coogler lets his freak flag fly high. If this is the kind of movie we can expect from up-and-comers once their Marvel contracts expire, we have a lot to look forward to.
Maybe the Tarantino comparison is a slight snub to Jordan Peele, who has turned socially conscious horror, or social commentary with supernatural elements, into a bona fide genre (to much box office success — of a kind that Sinners, with a $60 million worldwide opening, also seems to be replicating). Sinners feels like a further twist on elevated horror by not prepping us to go in expecting a metaphor.
Michael B. Jordan plays identical twin gangsters, Smoke and Stack, who have returned, like Depression-era carpetbaggers, to the Mississippi Delta after some time away in Chicago, to try to make their fortune by opening up a juke joint. Plenty of Tarantino movies have started from the premise of a big revisionist historical “what if.” Like, what if a cool stunt man killed the Manson Family and so California’s swingin’ sixties never ended, or what if a Dirty Dozen-style team of Jewish assassins had actually succeeded in taking out the Nazi high command? For Coogler in Sinners, the question seems to be “what if two smart gangsters bucked the trend of the Great Migration, and instead of fleeing Jim Crow to a new kind of redlined discrimination in the cities, tried to build an extra-legal power base of their own to battle the invisible empire on their home turf?”
As Smoke (or maybe it was Stack) explains it to their younger cousin, Sammy (Miles Caton), “we figured, maybe we’d be better off dealing with the devils we know.”
To that end, the two buy an old mill from a local Klansman (threatening him in the process) and start assembling a Dirty Dozen of their own, only for the purposes of running the juke joint of their dreams rather than assassinating Hans Landa. They start with their cousin Sammy, who sings and plays a mean slide guitar on the gorgeous resonator they bought him (a 1932 Dobro Cyclops to be specific). They move onto food purveyors and sign painters (Lisa and Bo Chow, played by Helena Chu and the mononymous Yao), a drunk piano player (the God Delroy Lindo) the best catfish fryer in the county (Wunmi Mosaku), and a big ol’ sharecropper named Cornbread to be their bouncer (Omar Miller from 8 Mile).
This process alone was so enjoyable that if that’s all Sinners was, I wouldn’t have been disappointed. A putting-on-a-big-party story as applied to 1932 Mississippi with great music, beautiful actors in dazzling costumes, and Michael B. Jordan doubling up a la James Franco in The Deuce (one of the most underrated shows of the last ten years) seems like more than enough conceits to keep things interesting. Especially when treated with this level of detail. That Coogler employed the producer of a documentary on the Delta Chinese as just one of his cultural consultants (for Lisa and Bo Chow) is emblematic of his approach. You don’t have to be a scholar on which little things are right to sense Coogler’s passion for getting the little things right. This is the kind of care that so many great movies are made of — you don’t worry so much about the destination when a creator cares this much about the journey. It’s why people like me love Robert Eggers so much (to throw in yet another comparison).
Between the music, the costumes, the food, and the acting, I was having so much fun that I truly didn’t see the twist coming. “Ryan Coogler period piece” was enough of a hook that I didn’t bother watching trailers or reading anything about Sinners (which I would also suggest you do too if you can, you probably know too much already STOP IT DON’T GO ANY FURTHER!). And so an hour into the film when Sinners suddenly revealed itself to be a vampire movie, it truly came as a surprise left hook. It’s a big risk to introduce the fantastic that late into a story, especially one I had been enjoying so much without it.
It would also be possible, maybe even natural, to argue that a story that essentially goes back in time to undo the Great Migration for a revisionist crowd-pleaser is already sufficiently fantastical, without introducing vampires, witch doctors, and stock supernatural characters that already come with their own pre-existing mythos (wooden stakes, sunlight, garlic — few of which elements Sinners bothers repudiating). It’s easy to imagine arguing against it if you’d read an early draft of Coogler’s script. And yet Coogler somehow manages this delicate dance, incorporating the ultimate in supernatural stock baddies into his meticulously realized world of Depression-era Delta blues without it cheapening anything that came before. Sinners plays like a wild solo that sometimes goes on strange, unexpected tangents, a little raunchy and discordant at times, but hammered out with such obvious passion that its improvisation and imperfectness only make it that much more exciting. Coogler lets us see him sweat, and it’s a thrill.
We’re conditioned, in a story that explicitly incorporates Jim Crow and the Black experience in early 20th century America, to interpret Sinners as a parable, to see these vampires as some grand metaphor — for the white power structure, capitalism, show business, fame, class solidarity, the demands of success, whatever. What’s the lesson? There’s plenty of material for a thesis here if you feel like putting in the work and doing the mental gymnastics. The vampires, at first a trio of white rednecks led by Jack O’Connell (Unbroken), even prove to be as musical as the bluesmen, breaking into O Brother Where Art Thou-style bluegrass and later into explicitly Irish folk (a clear influence on bluegrass) that’s just as boppin’ as the soulful slide and jaunty ragtime piano. But it seems to me even more fun that Sinners’ vampires don’t need to be a metaphor.
Sinners works on its own just as a wild story. It introduces the fantastic not necessarily as didactic social commentary but simply because it feels good. He does it for the same reason someone might add an electric guitar to folk music, or a drum machine to a hard rock riff (referenced overtly in Sinners’ goofiest, most fourth-wall-breaking scene, which still works). It’s fun to watch people kill vampires the same way it’s fun to watch them flirt and peacock and ham around in their 1930s Sunday best. If there is social commentary to Sinners, it’s in the way it subtly breaks down barriers between “white music” and “black music,” between “Irish music” and “Southern music.” Don’t Chinese people like fried catfish too?