After watching The Hurricane (1999), I had to do some research as to what else premiered in 1999.  The two that dominated the Academy Awards for that year were Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love, though the Italian film Life is Beautiful is also deserving of mention.  When you Google what movies came out in 1999, it gives you a list highlighted by Girl, Interrupted, 10 Things I Hate About You, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, and The Iron Giant.  Did you notice what title did not appear?  That is right, The Hurricane.  If you have seen this movie, or read the rest of this review, you will find this little fact apropos.  I also do not know how to quantify it not being mentioned among the popular titles from that year, or with the biopics.  Google does not even place it among the prominent dramas.  It could be because it was released nearly at the turn of the calendar.  However, a search engine will simply focus on dates, and December 29^th, 1999, is not 2000.  At any rate, the 2000 Academy Awards produced the same results, as in no love for today’s picture.  All this could explain why it slipped my notice until recently.  Hopefully, what I have to say about it will get you interested in a deserving flick.

There are a few things going on in The Hurricane that need to be explained for the plot to make sense.  It first lets you know that you are dealing with the true story (with some alterations) of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (Denzel Washington), a prize fighter of moderate success from Paterson, New Jersey.  Whenever he is in the ring, the film is in black and white. The next thing you see is Rubin some years later in prison, preparing himself to fight whoever enters his cell.  Another thread focuses on the life of Lesra Martin (Vicellous Reon Shannon), a high school kid from Brooklyn who has been taken in by a group of three people who live together in Toronto, Canada.  They are Sam Chaiton (Live Schreiber), Lisa Peters (Deborah Kara Unger), and Terry Swinton (John Hannah).  They are unmarried, just well-meaning roommates, but it is never fully explained why they picked this kid to live with them.  It has something to do with seeing his potential and wanting to nurture it, but it is a half-baked concept.  The main reason for Lesra being in the film is because Sam takes him to a book store where he buys a copy of Rubin’s auto-biography The Sixteenth Round (1974), on which The Hurricane is partially based.  Through his reading of Rubin’s story, we learn about how he came to be incarcerated.  Early on, the movie jumps around between the three themes that come up at different points.  For clarity’s sake, I will present it in chronological order, which makes sense for half of the proceedings since all our characters’ lives intersect at that the mid-point of the film.  For as long as Rubin could remember, the white population of Paterson was out to get him.  At eleven (Mitchell Taylor Jr.), Paterson police officer Sergeant Della Pesca (Dan Hedaya) sends young Rubin to a boy’s home for assaulting a rich executive who, it is suggested, is attempting to sexually molest one of Rubin’s friends.  Rubin describes the reformatory in unflattering ways, to say the least, and escapes at eighteen to join the army.  Following a term of service where he learned how to box, he returns to Paterson.  Though in uniform, Sergeant Pesca finds Rubin at the end of a date with his future wife, Mae Thelma (Debbi Morgan), and sends him back to prison to complete his sentence.  While behind bars, he dedicates himself to, as he puts it, turning himself into a weapon, and one full of hate.  He takes those feelings with him into his career as a professional boxer.  During this period, it is suggested that he is robbed of a potential title by a rigged decision at the end of one of his bouts.  It is shortly after this that two African Americans walk into a bar in another part of Paterson from the one in which Rubin is located, kill the all white patrons, and speed off in the same color vehicle as the one owned by Rubin.  Sergeant Pesca, now a detective, based on faulty eye witnesses, is all too eager to see that Rubin go back to jail.  He had vowed to never again set foot into a penitentiary, thus his first night there is difficult to accept.  The initial test comes when he is asked to take off his suit and put on a prison jumpsuit.  Upon refusing, he is forced to spend ninety days in solitary confinement.  In this space, he faces some truths about himself and his position in society that I will detail more in the next paragraph.  For the moment, we will say that he finally enters the general population a free man, so to speak.  It is around this time that he begins a correspondence with Lesra, who has been inspired by Rubin’s book.  This becomes in-person visits, and the kid’s enthusiasm begins to get Lisa, Sam, and Terry involved.  Despite Rubin losing hope after two unsuccessful appeals, these four decide to move to New Jersey from Canada and are determined to do what they can to secure his release.  They approach Rubin’s lawyers with their offer to help.  While the legal team is skeptical, they launch their own investigation into the events that led to Rubin’s arrest.  They uncover a number of irregularities that point to a racially motivated cover-up on the part of the Paterson Police Department, with Detective Pesca at the center.  Unfortunately, their one course of action that has yet to be tried is to take their case to federal court.  Doing so means they risk having all their new evidence nullified because it had yet to be entered in the lower system.  Yet, Judge H. Lee Sarokin (Rod Steiger) hears their case all the same, and it leads to Rubin finally being freed.

One of the things made clear in The Hurricane is that Rubin spent the majority of his life up until his release in 1985 behind bars.  To add a Catholic context to what I have already said, it should be noted that one of the corporal acts of mercy is to visit those imprisoned.  Doing so brings hope to those who have little to none.  For Rubin, keeping his aspirations alive is something that he believes he needs to do on his own.  I confess to agreeing with some of what he has to say about the experience of being in jail.  Those who keep you under lock and key do so because they have the assumption of power over you.  This is something that no man on Earth, no matter your situation, should exercise, though we have seen far too many examples of people attempting this anyway.  In order to reclaim his humanity, indeed, his freedom, Rubin decides that he is not going to comply with the system’s program for him.  Though he does, eventually, relent to wearing prison issued clothing, importantly it does not have his prisoner number, nor the usual stripes.  Further, he does not leave his cell and follows his own schedule.  The fact that he claims his humanity is a testament to his resilience, but it only takes him so far.  He would have lost any shred of dignity he had recovered had it not been for the intervention of Lesra, Lisa, Sam, and Terry.  Rubin accepting this assistance comes down to him rejecting the hate that had so long fueled him, and instead choosing love.  It is the care for others that allows him to fulfill the statement he makes at the end about love being what is going to allow him to leave prison, to gain his freedom.  2 Corinthians 3:17 says, “. . . where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”  Since we also know that God is love, then it follows that love is freedom.  This is how it was always meant to be, especially for a wrongfully convicted person like Rubin.

Given all the struggles Rubin had to overcome, is it surprising that The Hurricane got so little attention.  Washington was nominated in 2000 for best actor for portraying the eponymous character, but did not win.  That year it went to Kevin Spacey for his role in American Beauty (1999), which is an undeniably good movie.  Anyway, may we give The Hurricane the attention it deserves, no matter its tardiness.