"American Violet" anatomizes injustice

“American Violet,” a well-reviewed film about racial profiling and injustice in a small town in Texas, is the latest film edited by TFT alumna and faculty member Nancy Richardson MFA ’96. The film’s limited theatrical release began April 17,

The film stars newcomer Nicole Beharie as a young woman pressured by an ambitious prosecutor into accepting a plea bargain for a drug offence she did not commit — a pheneomenon the film sees as widespread and largely resoponsible for the racial disparity in the American prison population. Alfre Woodard, Xzibit and Charles S. Dutton co-star.

Editor Richardson responded to the project creatively, she says, because she knew and respected all of her collaborators, and because she was impressed by the power of Bill Haney’s script, which took a fairly complicated legal issue and made it compellingly dramatic.

“You have a situation where these prosecutors will raid the projects and pull in 40, 50, 60 people at a time,” Richardson explains, “the presumption being that because they are African Americans accused of drug-related crimes they must be guilty of something. By focusing on one young woman who refused to accept a forced plea bargain the film puts a human face on a very disturbing social injustice.”

Richardson cared enough about “Violet” to make room for it in her already packed schedule. She squeezed it in between other projects (including Catherine Hardwicke’s box office monster “Twilight”) and recruited two other editors, Terilyn Shropshire.and sometime UCLA instructor Curtiss Clayton, to work on the film in the early and late phases of production.

Reviewers have been impressed by the film’s determination to bring clarity to a complex phenomenon.

Rex Reed in the “New York Observer:”

“Forcefully written by Bill Haney and carefully directed by the talented Tim Disney, it challenges the inhuman boundaries of racial prejudice while chronicling the draconian arrest of an innocent 24-year-old African-American single mother with four daughters in a bump in the road called Melody, Texas. To protect the victim, the movie assigns her the fictitious name Dee Roberts, but she is played with so much terror, rage and desperation by an extraordinary actress named Nicole Beharie that complete reality is inescapable from start to finish.

Stephen Holden in the “New York Times:”

The movie's indictment of injustice and racial profiling in a small Texas town leaves no doubt about who are the good guys and the bad. Dee's defiance is heroic, as is her concern for the welfare of her children. Also heroic are her minister, Reverend Sanders (Charles S. Dutton), and David Cohen (Tim Blake Nelson), the lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union enlisted to defend Dee and sue the district attorney for racial discrimination.

…

The villain of "American Violet" is the local district attorney, Calvin Beckett, who appears to run the town. Played by Michael O'Keefe as a slicker contemporary version of the hulking, pig-eyed bullies portrayed in earlier films by Rod Steiger and Rip Torn, Beckett is shrewd enough not to vent his racism publicly, but it still leaks out of him like a bad smell. Navigating between the two sides is Sam Conroy (Will Patton), a local lawyer and former assistant district attorney who has a guilty conscience about past misdeeds.

…

A more manipulative film would have played up the drama of securing the damning evidence against Beckett, which is belatedly introduced at his deposition. The movie's staunchly liberal point of view extends to the 2000 presidential election, which is shown unfolding in the background. Al Gore's concession speech is used to suggest that the systemic racism in Melody is a symptom of a broader climate of injustice.

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Keywords

"nancy richardson" "american violet" 

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