Boy Movies #23

A tale of two Denzels

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In my ongoing effort to follow through on the single resolution I made for 2023 — to actually watch the movies on my Letterboxd watchlist rather than just adding more and letting them sit around gathering dust like unread books on a shelf — I programmed a Denzel Washington double feature on Saturday night. The first was Antoine Fuqua’s 2001 crime thriller Training Day, which won Denzel his second Oscar, followed by Spike Lee’s 2006 heist caper Inside Man, still the director’s highest-grossing film. I didn’t intend for these two choices to coalesce in such a complementary way, I honestly just stared for too long at the daunting grab bag of films that have made me say “I really need to watch that” at various stages throughout the years and thought, “What I really need is Denzel.” 

This is never a bad feeling to have. But here’s something I’ve been thinking about: Denzel is obviously one of the greats, but his movie stardom has reached a Tom Hanksian level of untouchably strange. (This doubles as a nod to Philadelphia, of course.) He’s transitioned largely to dad movies with the odd randomly interesting choice sprinkled in, though they usually get less attention. (It’s hard to make the claim that a high-profile, Oscar-nominated movie like The Tragedy of Macbeth got fucked by Covid, but I maintain that it’s underrated; Denzel performs Shakespeare with such humanity and virtuosity that you start to believe he just speaks like that.) He’s a curious figure in that he’s who many people over the age of fifty name when you ask them their favorite actor while also maintaining status as an actor’s actor, the kind of performer men who love movies love to mythologize for his avoidance of superhero films and franchise schlock. (He’s about to star in his third Equalizer movie, but I guess we’re not supposed to mention that.)

Denzel vs. Denzel

Training Day is, I’d wager, Denzel’s best-known performance, next to Malcolm X. Here, he plays corrupt LAPD narc Alonzo Harris, who over the course of two hours forces Ethan Hawke’s wide-eyed rookie Jake Hoyt to experience the worst day of his entire life. I laughed out loud when I looked up the release date and saw it came out on October 5, 2001. Not even a full month after 9/11 and Warner Bros. was like, “What the world needs right now is Training Day.” Maybe they were right! Who am I to say otherwise? Just a few years later, Denzel stars in the deeply post-9/11 Inside Man as Keith Frazier, a NYPD detective battling a scandal as he’s assigned to negotiate with the ringleader of an elaborate bank robbery. A tale of two cops, as brought to life by Denzel.

How does Hollywood consider the cop? What kind of effect has the Hollywood cop had on us as a culture? These were big conversation topics a few years ago, and I’m not positive we ever landed anywhere concrete, other than, like, forcing the creators of Brooklyn Nine-Nine into a crisis of faith. Training Day and Inside Man are interesting examples of works made long before any of this began. Now, here’s where I should be honest and say that I think Training Day is sort of bad, more “interesting” than it is a legitimately well-executed film.

One of my favorite activities is scrolling through the Letterboxd reviews of boy movies in order of popularity. If you’re ever dying to see the male community come together to form a gorgeous brotherhood of film enjoyers, this is the best and easiest method. The Letterboxd reviews of Training Day taught me that it is allegedly about how easily cops can toe the line between right and wrong, which I guess is true. Too bad that its ideas of right and wrong are so reductive that it falls apart the second you start to unpack it. It’s all just a bit too simplistic for my tastes, as a lot of films that rely on the hope of being described by critics as “gritty” tend to. If it has complexity, it’s almost entirely thanks Denzel’s electric performance as the charismatic, mercurial, and deceitful Alonzo. He’s an absolute live wire and having a phenomenal time adding layers to an audacious character who, in anyone else’s hands, might run the risk of veering into Disney villain territory. There is never any question why Hawke’s Jake is so easily coerced — not just because the future of his career depends on it, but because the guy has such a disarmingly huge presence, unlike anyone else he or the viewer have ever encountered.

By the end, Fuqua and screenwriter David Ayer (who also wrote The Fast and the Furious; this man is boy movie royalty) have done a lot of moralizing but not enough actual exploration of the broken institution that turned Alonzo into, and allowed him to flourish as, a crooked cop. That’s why it’s best to ignore most of Training Day’s messaging and look at it exclusively through its core duo. Consider the spark in Alonzo’s eye when Jake first holds a gun to him; there is nothing more satisfying to someone like Alonzo, steadfast in his belief that the decay of the soul is not only necessary but inevitable, than watching someone become consumed by the same darkness that has consumed him. Forgive me for the reference I’m about to make, but since I know we all have Succession on the brain: It’s Denzel’s version of that smile from Logan at the end of Season 2 during Kendall’s press conference. You have to be a killer!

Which brings me to Inside Man, a cynical jolt of a movie that juggles a whole lot of ideas pretty magnificently (except that random one about violent video games that goes absolutely nowhere but is so of its time, and so Spike, that I’ll give it a pass). There’s a casual frankness in Inside Man’s reminders of how atrocious the police are: The attacking of Waris Ahluwalia’s hostage when the cops notice he’s wearing a turban; the lack of respect Willem Dafoe’s captain initially has for Denzel’s Frazier and his partner, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor; the probing at the bloated NYPD budget — what exactly is all of that money being used for, other than to abuse citizens? It’s a story based in obfuscation; everyone knows everyone else is lying and/or hiding deeper motivations, they just can’t prove it yet. This is not a film about morals or solutions. Inside Man tells us that vile shit is happening and it’s all part of an enormous, interweaving system greater than any of us could imagine.

And within it, yet again, lies an enigmatic relationship between Denzel and a white guy. There is perhaps no dynamic more reliable in entertainment than the one between a detective and the criminal they’re investigating; here, the push and pull between the smooth, silky Frazier and the stoic, murmuring Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) lights Inside Man up. Until the very last frame, these two are engaged in a war of delicious psychological warfare. Their constant sizing up of each other is riveting to watch: Who has the upper hand? Who will make the other break first? “You’re too damn smart to be a cop,” Russell tells Frazier at one point, begrudgingly respectful. He may have thought out the perfect heist, but he didn’t budget for an evenly matched adversary. When they interact, Inside Man becomes Heat by way of Spike Lee.

These two films converge in a lot of areas, but especially in their perceptions of “good” and “evil,” and their varying degrees of belief in the existence of both. Characters within Training Day criticize the cops, but the film around them keeps reminding us that There Are Some Good Guys, No, Really! Inside Man also has a decent man at its center in Frazier, but it’s sly about the way it acknowledges his role in contributing to the rancid culture of the NYPD — even he can’t stop himself from minimizing Ahluwalia’s character’s distress with a joke. I’m not sure what the correct fate is for the Hollywood copaganda machine (what are we supposed to do, like, collectively, about Dick Wolf? Leave him unemployed?), and I’m not going to be so bold as to suggest that Denzel can — or, honestly, should; actors do not have answers for us, ever — lead us any closer to figuring it out, especially at this point in his career. But I look at movies like these and think about that famous old adage: I’d rather watch Training Day fifty times than watch the John Krasinski CIA show once.

• I took the use of that Leonard Cohen song in Sunday’s Succession too seriously and wrote about it for TV Guide. “I took Succession too seriously” could also be the title of my autobiography.