The Slap
I’ve deliberately waited to comment on The Slap that took place onstage at the Oscars on March 27. Last Friday the Academy’s final decision on Will Smith came down.
What most chilled me about the incident was Chris Rock’s stunned reeling backward from – or was he absorbing? – the blow. Apparently, Smith did no lasting damage, but to my eyes the assault looked savage. I shuddered. Almost immediately, I thought of Rock’s children witnessing their father being brutally attacked and physically humiliated before millions of onlookers. Rock’s brother Kenny said the moment “eats at me.”
We’ve now learned that Smith will have to take ten years’ banishment from the Academy. Which means, in real terms, that that organization’s premises are off limits to him. How much will that actually sting? Perhaps not much. But the specter of his raging, twisted ego will live for a time on the Dolby Theater’s stage. We’ll all feel it hovering there as we watch next year’s telecast. Violence interrupts the flow of life. It’s not easily erased.
Was the Academy’s punishment severe enough? I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone deserves a way back. If we believe in rehabilitation at all, we can’t refuse Will Smith his chance at it. It would be a big mistake if the way back were easy, automatic or soon, and that won’t happen here.
But Smith wasn’t removed from the auditorium after the slap, nor after twice shouting an obscene taunt to Rock. Live before millions worldwide. Black male to Black male. We abhor it when we see Black guards beating prison inmates of any color. Then how can we accept it when Smith assaults a Black man and 30 minutes later receives a standing ovation after a rambling, confused “apology” to the Academy and his fellow nominees – but not an apology to the man he’d just attacked?
Black dignity and self-respect endure within and alongside Black lives, and they need defending every day. They’re the reason Black Lives Matter. Both Smith and his wife Jada seem to have forgotten that.
That blow wasn’t one I would have easily withstood. How many others in the auditorium would have? Many who saw the whole thing in person actually rallied around the man who had the most money. And who was taller and weighed more.
I haven’t seen it reported that anyone in authority asked Will Smith to leave the venue. In its original statement the Academy was right to cast blame on itself. Their response, or lack of it, was cowardly.
As unwilling hosts for this crime, the Academy needs rehabilitating, too. In their statement the other day announcing Smith’s punishment, they thanked Rock for his “composure” but said not a word about his pain. Apparently, they’re moving on from the assault. But scars endure and won’t be covered up with standing ovations.
What exactly was Rock's offense? Alopecia is a condition, not a debilitating illness. Certainly no one wishes Jada Smith any unease. But I’ve still seen no evidence that Rock knew of what she was undergoing when he made his GI Jane joke. As Will rose from his seat to march toward the stage, many saw it as chivalrous, a Black man defending a Black woman. Defending what exactly? Her “honor”? Is that what she regained in the ring of that slap?
The question I haven’t heard asked is, when Smith rose to move toward that stage, why didn’t Jada also rise and stop him? Where was her sense of honor, both her husband’s and her own, at that moment? Why couldn't she have been adult enough to take her husband by the arm and say, in effect, Wait, we can handle this later. We’re not brawlers. Instead, the tape seems to show that when the slap rang out, Jada smiled. What does the Academy, and what are we to, make of her behavior?
Will danced the night away at the Vanity Fair afterparty, but there’s no getting around the fact that earlier that evening he’d suffered some kind of breakdown with the world watching.
I think this is going to leave a lasting mark on Smith, who’s stained his own legacy. His Oscar wasn’t rescinded and shouldn’t have been. He gave a solid performance in King Richard and the members chose to honor him for it. This night should have been a crowning achievement. Instead, his transgression will dog perceptions of him, in the industry and with audiences, for at least a decade. How many standing ovations lie ahead for a man who before millions lost his cool, abandoned his famous, captivating smile, and gave in to making a smooth thug move?
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Will and Jake Gyllenhaal as Danny in Ambulance
Ambulance (2022)
Ambulance might be easily pigeonholed as a slam-bang action picture, the director Michael Bay’s signature specialty. I’d never seen a Michael Bay movie before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Ten minutes in, the propulsive camera moves and jittery cuts had me shifting anxiously in my seat, and when the camera began to swoop, dive or zoom in for skin-pore closeups, I was in the palm of this director’s hand. Bay is fast but, in this movie anyway, he’s never sloppy.
What made it easy to tumble into Ambulance’s whirl was Bay’s sensual ease in photographing bright, hot Los Angeles. The city’s infamously slow traffic seems to put drivers into a permanently snarled crawl. Bay doesn’t see it that way. He understands that L.A.’s street map is laden with lanes, bends, seeming cul-de-sacs and alleyways. There’s even the concrete bed of The Los Angeles River, that miles-long three-inch deep riddle that’s a handy escape route for a getaway vehicle.
It’s where at one point our protagonists barrel away from pursuing police. The Sharp brothers, Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) aren't biological siblings, but were raised together. Danny, the arrogant one, is white, and has a bank robber’s history, or habit, that’s kept him in criminal mode. So far, he’s escaped jail time. Will, an orphan who was taken in as a boy by Danny’s family, is Black and happily married to Amy (Moses Ingram), with a young son. But Amy needs life-saving surgery costing $231,000, which isn’t covered by insurance, so a desperate Will goes to Danny for a loan.
It’s been a while since they’ve been in touch. In the interim their father, Danny’s dad and Will’s step-dad, has died, and Danny still hasn't met his young nephew, Will’s son. Much as Danny would like to help Will, he doesn’t have the cash for the operation, but he does have a proposition. Will can solve all his problems if he’ll join Danny and the handful of lowlifes he’s recruited to rob a downtown bank currently holding $32 million for transfer. That’s ridiculously easy pickings for the practiced robber Danny. Oh, and by the way, they’re off to make the big score in five minutes. Is Will in or out?
Frantic to help his wife, Will agrees to join in, and we immediately sense that the poor guy has no idea what he’s letting himself in for. As matters turns out, neither does Danny. The big score begins to go wildly off track when, mid-heist, Zach (Jackson White), a lone police officer, ambles into the bank trying to land a date with a pretty teller. Just as Zach realizes he’s stumbled into a robbery-in-progress, the operation’s cover is blown, police surround the bank, and most of the gang is caught or killed.
But Danny and Will get away. In the melee Will panics and shoots Zach. In fleeing the scene, their only escape option is to hijack an ambulance – the very ambulance that’s transporting Zach to the hospital. They throw out the driver and Will takes the wheel. Left on board is an experienced EMT nurse, Cam (Eiza González), with nerves of steel. She’ll need them. As she works to save the wounded Zach, L.A. police operatives, later partnered with the FBI, join forces to stop the fleeing ambulance.
Will has worked as a driver and knows the city’s streets well. He’s about to travel them as never before, at high speed, with jumpy Danny calling the shots in radio communication with LAPD Captain Monroe (Garret Dillahunt), who’s determined to bring in this wild pair and save the life of the wounded officer. He’s got helicopters, armed vehicles and vision-enhanced radar to track the fleeing bandits. The criminals have little but a couple of automatic weapons and bravado. Yet for nearly the entire movie they keep the authorities in a standoff, and Bay and scriptwriter Chris Fedak continue to up the ante with clever, if occasionally risible, invention.
Bay shoots action, from blazing gun battles to tumbling, exploding vehicles, with consummate verve. The rhythms land just right. He also understands how, in a class and ethnically diverse downtown Los Angeles, with its gleaming corporate towers and corkscrewed traffic, anyone can lose their way. It’s not just Danny and Will who are out of control. The city’s power structure can’t get a grip. Bay’s camera at one point simply glides all the way up one side of L.A.’s City Hall, then shinies back down the other side, with no plot point made. Helicopters surround the fleeing ambulance but Danny successfully chases them off with gunfire. The police can track the captured vehicle with radar and even talk to Danny and Will, but with an officer’s life at stake, and a skilled nurse trying to keep him alive, simply blowing the two crooks away is a highly risky option.
Bay’s ever-shifting cameras, sometimes mounted on drones, sometimes yield three- or four-second shots, spliced together to crisp effect by editor Pietro Scalia. The result is close to hallucinatory, and thus not always entirely credible. You never quite believe that the cops couldn’t get ahead of this fleeing ambulance. And for all the police and FBI high-tech maneuvering, you never forget that loopy Danny is really driving the action.
Gyllenhaal’s tightly managed performance is increasingly wild-eyed, and we don’t get many truly satisfying laughs out of Danny’s witless crude humor. But Gyllenhaal never lets Danny appear outright stupid. You see why the police tread carefully with him. Abdul-Mateen makes Will’s humanity shine through, even when he’s raging at the maniacally driven Danny.
Eiza González as First Responder EMT Nurse Cam in Ambulance
But the acting standout is González as first responding nurse Cam. She is believable as a cool pro amidst the madness, but also as a canny manipulator of two violent men who don’t seem to understand that all but certain destruction awaits all four people on board the wayward ambulance. Cam keeps us grounded, and González's performance knits the picture together. She gets the movie’s closing shot, and both the nurse and the actress have earned it.
Since this is my first Michael Bay movie, his detractors might say I was taken in by the razzle-dazzle. But all the way through I felt myself skillfully manipulated, not mauled, by a gleeful entertainer who’s more than a mere master of jolts. Bay provides plenty of shocks, but I was also surprised by the first grudging, then deepening bits of humanizing he often gives his desperate characters, on both sides of the law. They’ve got problems, and Bay and Fendak present them with terrible odds and then ramp up the pressure.
But for the audience there’s pleasure in watching them fight back, even against their own less than pure instincts. You come out of the movie swirling just as its characters have. Seeing right and wrong in persuasive conflict can feel something like a ghastly traffic accident. We may not want to look, but we can’t look away.