Movie Review: Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992

Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992 **** / *****

Directed by: John Ridley.

Written by: John Ridley.

 

Back in April – the 25^th Anniversary of the L.A. Riots (or L.A. Uprising if you prefer) I reviewed four films in one massive review on the subject – Spike Lee’s Rodney King, L.A. 92, Burn, Motherfucker, Burn! and L.A. BurningL The Riots 25 Years Later. All of them had something of interest to say about the riots, but had their drawbacks as well (some more than others). Of that group, I thought L.A. 92 – which aired on National Geographic – was the best – essentially the filmmakers pieced together archival news footage of the events, and cut it together so it felt like you were watching things unfold in real time. At that time, I did note that there was another film I wanted to see but it wasn’t available yet – John Ridley’s Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992 – which I did not watch when they aired it on network TV, since they were reducing a movie that ran 2 hours and 24 minutes to a 2 hour slot, full of commercials – this did not seem like an ideal way to present an important film. So I waited – and finally, with the film being released on Netflix, I was able to take in Ridley’s film. I’m still not sure it’s better than L.A. 92 – but the two are clearly the best, and both offer much different, important angles on what happened – and Ridley’s film provides more context, without getting lost (which was the issue with the very ambitious, not altogether successful Burn, Motherfucker, Burn).

 

Ridley – the acclaimed novelist. Oscar winning screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave, and TV creator – has crafted a brilliant documentary that looks backwards in time from 1982, until the riots a decade later. The first hour of the film is basically the lead-up to riots, as it documents the controversial police chief Daryl Gates, the LAPD’s problems with dealing with the African American community – the deaths that resulted from the chokeholds that the LAPD later banned, giving their officers the metal batons used to beat Rodney King instead, and finally the beating that King received at the hands of those officers. This distillation of a tumultuous decade in Los Angeles has been the downfall of other filmmakers – who either dive too deeply and get lost, or don’t understand it at all – but Ridley moves deftly and quickly through this history, and in a way that is engrossing, fascinating, infuriating and emotional.

 

The next hour of the documentary, is basically the riots themselves – the trial of the police officers accused, and the anger that spilled out into the streets. What Ridley does here is fascinating – he has interviews with almost everyone you would want him to (the officers who beat King obviously are not here, neither is King himself, who died in 2012, or Gates who died in 2010) – but he doesn’t let us know who they are until after they start speaking. We get their story and their perspectives, without pre-judging them, and only gradually do we understand the roles that they played. Ridley also presents the most complex view of the riots themselves I have seen – showing how some people, however well-meaning they were, actually did things to make things on the ground worse. There is footage here I have never seen before, and while that doesn’t necessarily change your view on what happened, it deepens it.

 

The final 20 minutes or so of the documentary are a fascinating coda – and unlike the other documentaries, Ridley doesn’t treat it as an afterthought. We have seen – in this film and others – some of the brutal attacks that happened during the riots – including that on the white truck driver, who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The film has interviews with the young black men who carried out that beating (it doesn’t reveal who they are until late in the film, even though they’ve been there throughout) – and while I found myself not necessarily feeling bad for them – they were guilty of something, right? – you kind of do have to wonder why it is that they faced harsher penalties than anyone else.

 

Throughout Let it Fall, Ridley does a great job at showing sympathy and empathy for many involved – especially those who lost loved ones, who he gives the space the breathe a little bit, and tell their stories, and doesn’t just rush them through. This is documentary filmmaking at its finest – and even if you’ve seen this history in the other films mentioned (not to mention last year’s magnum opus O.J.: Made in America) it is still more than worthwhile. American still needs to deal with the fallout of this – and they haven’t yet, which is why this documentary is so relevant today – even if Ridley never comes into the present, it’s still easy to feel it.