The new warden of a small prison farm in Arkansas tries to clean it up of corruption after initially posing as an inmate.
It’s hard to watch, but Brubaker Movie is a sombre drama about jail abusesthat should have held our attention from start to finish because of how realistic it is. So why isn’t this working? I believe it’s due to the author’s conscious choice to concentrate on the story’s difficulties rather than the characters.
All of the characters in this film play a specific function, from the Idealistic Reformer to the Corrupt Administrator to the Noble Prisoner to the Tough Guard. As soon as they’re given a certain ideology, they act in accordance with it throughout the film. No place for the spontaneity of actual human beings caught in real circumstances is available
That’s particularly irksome when it comes to Robert Redford’s portrayal of Brubaker, a character whose breadth is so limited. Reformed warden Brubaker is tasked with cleaning up the brutality and corruption at Wakefield Prison Farm, a hellhole of sadism where no guards are required since the prisoner trusties are armed and gain time off their sentences for killing escapees. The opening 20 or 30 minutes of the film, which are sickeningly effective, depict prison life, where beatings, bribes, rape, and slum living conditions are all too usual.
Brubaker is first-hand witness to these heinous crimes. As a prisoner, he has been carried inside the jail himself. The movie’s major surprise is meant to come when he eventually walks forward and announces himself, yet all the commercials for the film ruin the surprise by identifying Redford as the warden.
Even though his fellow new inmates are being raped, beaten and coerced into the prison’s system of corruption, Redford emerges undamaged from these early moments. He observes, he listens and he’s mainly left alone by the other convicts.
Predictability sets in when Redford takes the reins. The state board of prisons, on the other hand, supports corrupt business as usual while advocating for progressive improvements. Yaphet Kotto, a hard-boiled trusty who can’t make up his mind about the warden, and Jane Alexander, a pragmatic advisor to the state governor, are two of the more fascinating newcomers. Although Murray Hamilton does an excellent job portraying a corrupt member of the state’s jail board, he’s done this part so many times before that he must have memorised it.
The movie’s failure to give its characters more humanity is making us restless in the meanwhile. However, the script puts up a barrier; the characters behave in accordance with the ideologies that the screenplay assigns to them, and that’s it.
Half of Redford’s statements seem like editorials, yet we never learn anything about the man himself. What is the storey behind him? Was she ever his wife? Is this the first time he’s worked in a prison? It seems that he received this position because of Jane Alexander, but what really is their relationship? When Alexander fans her neck and stares at Redford, it appears as though she’s thinking about something completely unpolitical, yet the movie keeps on. While “Brubaker” is a well-executed film that captures the jail in all its glory, the film then fills the prison with positions rather than actual human beings.
Initial release: 20 June 1980
Director: Stuart Rosenberg
Story by: W. D. Richter; Arthur Ross
Based on: Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal; by: Tom Murton; Joe Hyams
Music by: Lalo Schifrin
Box office: $37,121,708
Brubaker 1980 Movie Cast & Crew
Robert Redford as Henry Brubaker
Yaphet Kotto as Dickie Coombes
Jane Alexander as Lillian Gray
Murray Hamilton as John Deach
David Keith as Larry Lee Bullen
Morgan Freeman as Walter
Matt Clark as Purcell
Tim McIntire as Huey Rauch
Richard Ward as Abraham Cook
M. Emmet Walsh as C.P. Woodward
Albert Salmi as Rory Poke
Linda Haynes as Carol
Everett McGill as Caldwell
Val Avery as Wendel
Ronald C. Frazier as Willets
David D. Harris as Duane Spivey
Joe Spinell as Floyd Birdwell
