Blood Relations
Ryan Coogler's Sinners is a crowdpleaser with a difference.
This piece contains spoilers for Sinners.
“The reason why I love the medium is multiplex movies,” Ryan Coogler recently told The New Yorker, citing The Fugitive and The Dark Knight along with Do the Right Thing, in case anyone suspected the director of Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever of being an art filmmaker in disguise. Sinners, which he directed from his own original screenplay, isn’t much like most of what’s been in multiplexes lately—or ever, in some respects. Still, this horror-fantasy-gangster-musical-thinkpiece is a multiplex movie, showing he’s learned a good deal from the gruelling experience of working twice with Marvel, most crucially that the surefire way to reach a broad public is to supply a maximum of varied material, leaving it to us to assemble whichever version of the story we prefer.
On this choose-your-own-adventure principle, Sinners gives us two versions of Coogler’s regular star, Michael B. Jordan, showing off his newfound swaggering authority twice over as the twin brothers Elijah and Elias Moore, otherwise known as Smoke and Stack, who learned to fight in the trenches of the First World War, made a pile in Chicago working for Al Capone, and have now returned home to Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta to open up a juke joint (the year is 1932). Famed and feared at least on the Black side of this segregated community, they operate as a seemingly indissoluble unit, close enough to light each others’ cigarettes. Still, there’s no difficulty in telling them apart, and not only by their colour-coded headgear (Stack wears a red derby, Smoke a sky-blue flat cap). Stack is the cocky, sweet-talking frontman, who also seems to be the real music enthusiast of the pair; Smoke is more cautious, more privately vulnerable, and more likely to be the one pulling the trigger.