The Hurricane

I saw a "60 Minutes" segment on Rubin "Hurricane" Carter back in the 70s, around the time that Dylan's song about the imprisoned prizefighter was a hit…and then pretty much forgot about him. Fortunately for Carter, although almost everybody else did too, there were a few that didn't. Therein hangs Norman Jewison's (A Soldier's Story, Moonstruck) excellent account of Carter's decades-long battle for freedom.

As related in an initial flurry of scenes spanning his troubled life, Carter (played as an adult by Denzel Washington) spent much of his youth in juvie before escaping (literally) to find purpose as first a champion Army boxer, then a top contender for the world middleweight title, only to wind up serving triple life-sentences for a grisly shooting at a New Jersey bar. Doggedly maintaining and defending his innocence throughout, he clung to independence even behind bars, where he penned his autobiography. Retrial and appeals failed, with future efforts in doubt, until a Brooklyn youth named Lezra, informally adopted and home-schooled by a trio of bohemian Canadians (a story in itself), discovers a copy of Carter's book for 25 cents at a Toronto library sale.

Moved by the account, Lezra begins corresponding with, and eventually visits, the author of the first book he's ever read. He persuades his yuppie benefactors -- played by Liev Schreiber, Deborah Unger, and John Hannah -- to accompany him on one such trip to the Jersey prison, where despite an uneasy introduction they begin a friendship that moves them to relocate nearby and help seek a new hearing. While reexamining old evidence they discover several glaring holes in the state's case, but parties within local law enforcement seem to have a vested, racist interest in keeping Carter locked up, so it's not clear until the end whether Rubin will earn, much less win, another day in court.

While The Hurricane occasionally suffers from less-than-stellar dialogue (its curiously selected writers, though working from both Carter's autobiography The Sixteenth Round and a later account, Lazurus and The Hurricane, have such things as Thank God It's Friday and Surf Ninjas to their credit), Denzel Washington gives a great performance, effectively encompassing nearly 30 years of physical and emotional changes in a figure who deals with the gloom of incarceration by manifesting a defiant Zen asceticism. Nearly as impressive is Vicellous Reon Shannon, ably depicting Lezra's difficult maturation from skeptical, illiterate youth to determined crusader.

"It's important to transcend the places that hold us." A-

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