The Inspection (2022)
The few, the frightened, the Marines. Being Black and gay in the 2005 Corps.
The Inspection (2022)
Ellis French (Jeremy Pope) grapples with the Corps and himself in The Inspection
American military triumphalism is now viewed with deepening skepticism in the wake of the failed U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Maybe war isn’t any longer, for the most part, hell. Maybe now it’s mostly endurance.
The Inspection, set in 2005, situates this disenchantment not within the Pentagon but way down the chain of command, in the hearts and minds of raw recruits.
The movie doesn’t rule out heroism in the military. Yet it suggests that the most crucial test of character may be surviving not combat but, much earlier, boot camp.
Working from his own script drawn from personal experience, director Elegance Bratton, patriotism be damned, wonders how low you might have fallen if you desperately need to join the military.
Pretty freaking far. Ellis French (Jeremy Pope) is Black, gay, in his mid-20s and going nowhere. Since he was 16 years old, he’s scraped by living on and off the streets and he now huddles in a homeless shelter.
He figures he has nothing to lose by joining the U.S. Marine Corps. To sign up, he’ll need his birth certificate, which means a visit to his estranged mother, Inez (Gabrielle Union).
Inez, struggling as a security guard on the night shift, wants nothing to do with her son. She sneers at the prospect of a gay young man – she’s a devout Christian who regrets and disparages his sexuality – getting over in, of all places, the Marines.
Still, before he leaves her tiny apartment, she voices an intensely qualified hope that with this step Ellis might finally turn his life around and get past this “gay” phase.
In a New Jersey training compound, we’re shown Marine recruits’ starkly shaven heads, the grueling physical ordeals they undergo to get in shape, and the pitiless boot camp pecking order that stalks their every waking moment.
Ellis’ most deeply hidden secret, that he’s gay, is revealed early in this all-male environment. In a group shower he has an erection, and the recruit who sees it shouts out the discovery.
Within seconds, fellow recruits savagely beat Ellis, and he’s instantly outed and despised as a “faggot”.
His self-realization has to dig deeper. It delves into, which is rarely done piercingly in any of the arts, the Black inner life, the juncture where despair and hope pulsate next to one another, minute by minute, day by day. The movie refuses to simplify that near constant churning in the guts.
Being gay in the military in 2005 meant living under the don’t ask/don’t tell compromise. Being gay wasn’t forbidden, but nobody had to tolerate it, so the hurling of hatred could be brazenly improvised.
Ellis’ fellow recruits demand that he sleeps apart from them. Commanding officers don’t object.
I’d seen Pope in 2018 on Broadway in Choir Boy, where he compassionately sang, danced and acted the role of a gay Black prep school student fighting his way out of the closet.
And he was coolly untroubled in 2020 as a blithe, only semi-closeted friend of the young Rock Hudson in Ryan Murphy’s nostalgic HBO series Hollywood.
What I didn’t foresee was that Pope could play abandonment, desperation and loneliness as unflinchingly as he does here.
When Ellis is mocked and mistreated by a sadistic staff sergeant, Laws (Bokeem Woodbine, in an uncompromisingly vicious performance), completion of his training begins to look hopeless, and Pope’s face trembles with despair.
So deep is Laws’ contempt, in an underwater exercise he nearly drowns Ellis, who has to have his breathing urgently revived when he’s on the edge of dying.
Yet many of his fellow recruits still refuse to let up on their own anti-gay taunting. He pleads for understanding from a training officer, Rosales (Raúl Castillo), who bluntly informs him that being gay or straight no longer makes a crucial difference in the military.
Telling the simple truth, Rosales advises, is the surest countermove.
Ellis (Jeremy Pope) is told hard truths by senior officer Rosales (Raúl Castillo)
Fortunately, Ellis is handed a chance to do just that. In a weapons-firing exam, Ellis hits the targets within an acceptable range, but another recruit, put up to it by Laws, rigs the results to make it look as though Ellis has failed.
A disbelieving Ellis doggedly exposes the cheating, but still needs to retake the exam. He clearly passes and wins respect from the entire squad for standing up to Laws – and for shooting straight.
Camaraderie begins to outweigh doubts. All the recruits gradually realize that deliverance on the battlefield will rest in their reliance on each other, a principle it’s just possible the Marine Corps has been trying to instill in them all along.
Differences matter, but in combat they mustn’t divide one Marine from another.
What’s more, Ellis comes to believe, wondrously, that in uniform he can indeed be Black and gay. But to reliably serve beside his fellows, with a weapon in hand and lives in the balance, he’ll need to be, pre-eminently, himself.
And who is that exactly? One personal test remains. Can Inez embrace her gay son’s sexuality now that he’s a proudly uniformed Marine, toughened by training, having won both acceptance and respect from fellow Marines and his superior officers?
Ellis telephones Inez, pleading with her to attend his graduation. How she and Ellis move forward from that ceremony makes up the movie’s startling climax, which is uplifting and earthbound all at once.
Union, in only a handful of scenes, credibly etches Inez’s lifetime of fragile hopes and wilting dreams. Inez bore Ellis when she was 16, so it’s turned out that both mother and son were cast adrift at exactly the same age.
Inez (Gabrielle Union) and Ellis (Jeremy Pope) tap a renewed mother-son affection
We glimpse a Black woman scuffling to hold onto her own small chunk of dignity while being asked to give her son the unqualified support he’s so long needed.
Though Bratton’s script mines his own bruised youth, in his feature film directing debut it’s impressive how objectively compelling he and cinematographer Lachlan Milne make Marine training, with its grinding routines and punishing rites.
Bratton gets his cast to go all in. As I watched, I believed in bones nearly crunching, emotions tumbling into despair, and doubts growing about how much punishment any recruit could stand.
The script doesn’t shortchange either Black or gay grievances about inequity, unfairness, or the nearly immobilizing pain they can bring on.
But it refuses to hinge Ellis’ maturing entirely on uplift, overcoming odds, or beating back bigotry.
His self-realization has to go deeper. It delves into, which is rarely done piercingly in any of the arts, the Black inner life, the juncture where despair and hope pulsate next to one another, minute by minute, day by day. The movie refuses to simplify that near constant churning in the guts.
Which finally means that The Inspection isn’t a protest picture. It isn’t asking for anything from the U.S. Marines, the gay and Black communities or any of America’s hotheaded tribes.
It’s doing the harder work that all honest art has to do, which nobody actually wants it to do. It’s counting the cost of every effort to move every life forward so much as a scintilla.
The movie lets nobody off Scot free, unscathed or unjudged. But ultimately everyone is respected, their galling contradictions faced, enfolded and shone forth.
Sign me up.