Nothing seems so bad after watching Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Kings, except for Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Kings. Sans Ergüven’s involvement, Kings would be merely a bad idea, something we could gawp at perplexed before moving on with our lives. If you haven’t seen her last film, Mustang, by far one of 2015’s best, then maybe you’ll be able to do that, but the divide separating her debut from her follow-up is a canyon’s width. How does a filmmaker go from a lauded debut to a sophomore feature this disastrous?
Maybe there’s an inside baseball reason behind Kings’ creative failure, or maybe now’s a good time to remember that Ergüven wrote it before she made Mustang. If the latter, she still made the decision to move ahead with it after the fact, and it’s still awful. Where Mustang stays on a naturalist wavelength from beginning to end, Kings constantly swaps tones and aesthetics, caroming from biopic, to romantic drama, to melodrama, to teen coming-of-age drama, to thriller, to documentary. The movie refuses to settle on one mien and stick with it. It’s genre salad, and every ingredient is wilted at a moment in America where Kings’ historical makeup remains fresh.
The film takes place against the backdrop of the Rodney King trial and the riots responding to the acquittals of the police officers who assaulted him, though it begins in 1991 with the death of Latasha Harlins. It’s a bluntly orchestrated moment of violence that segues into an image of her pooling blood superimposed over molten lava bursting from the earth: Ergüven isn’t aiming for subtlety here. Obvious or not, the shot’s sledgehammer impact is as effectively jarring as its aftermath is brief. The film moves rather quickly from Harlins’ death to the everyday struggles of Millie (Halle Berry), a single foster mother looking after eight children, working her butt off to provide for them, shelter them and love them, each task equally difficult in light of her personal circumstances and Los Angeles’s social temperature.
Ergüven settles her focus on Millie’s story in 1992, unfolding over the panorama of King’s ordeal and judicial neglect. The problem is that Kings doesn’t make a decision about whether it wants to explore life in South Central at a boiling point for racial tensions or the escalating effect gross legal injustice can have on those tensions. At a glance, they sound like they’re one and the same, and perhaps a more fluid version of Kings would dramatize how each shapes the other. But Ergüven’s narrative is disjointed enough that Millie’s day to day feels rooted in another movie divorced from the explosive unrest released by the trial’s verdict. When the rioting begins, she practically gets caught in its undertow by accident, and only braves the threat of violence to recover her kids when they go to participate in the disorder themselves.
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