Dead Presidents: The Landmark That Could Have Been

If there’s one thing that we can agree about when it comes to the consensus classics of cinema, it’s that they are mostly packed to the brim with white people. There are some exceptions, and usually mainstream films will throw in a black character or two, but often these characters just aren’t all that important. They are normally there just to make sure the filmmakers can't be accused of excluding an entire race. When a major film is made about African Americans, they frequently feel like the result of a bunch of white people patting themselves on the back. Two recent examples that were recognized at the Academy Awards—The Blind Side and The Help—aren’t about black history and culture so much as they are about Caucasians and how they can lend a helping hand to the race that they have oppressed for so long. (Though I do think The Help has its moments.) I feel we are in vital need of a great film that takes African Americans seriously, and it is my belief that the Hughes brothers’ Dead Presidents could have and should have been that movie. That is doesn’t quite succeed is one of cinema’s great recent missed opportunities.

I am fully aware I am writing this as an exceptionally white 20-year-old male who graduated from high school here and currently goes to college here. I claim to understand absolutely nothing about the African American experience, so I will understand if any black readers call me out in the comments for not knowing what I’m talking about.  But as a guilty white man, I am often embarrassed by pop culture’s reluctance to explore something that should have been explored a million times over. Instead, we are mostly content to tell stories about us and our white people problems, and we’ll throw you into our movies when we’re in need of a likable third banana who will probably be the first to die. I’m glad that parts exist for black actors, but can’t we make some more movies that deal with their lives without a white protagonist in the way?

When I saw Dead Presidents, it struck me as one of the more unfortunate failures I’ve ever seen. Going into it, I knew nothing about the film besides the effectively creepy poster and its middling 45% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I also recognized filmmakers The Hughes Brothers, whose 2010 film The Book of Eli I quite enjoyed. The only reason I watched this movie is because one of my classes required it. Otherwise, it was not particularly high on my “must see” list. Though it has many, many flaws, I think it’s a movie that more people should see. Dead Presidents starts to betray itself about halfway through, but there’s no denying it’s an incredibly ambitious film that bites off a whole lot and attempts to chew what it can. It doesn't quite succeed, but I'm sure glad it tried.

While I was watching the film’s first act, I was mentally preparing to fire up my word processor and crank out an angry post asking why this film wasn’t considered a classic and one of the most important films of the last 20-or-so years. At its best, it plays like an African American Goodfellas that stylishly shines a light on life in the Bronx throughout the second half of the twentieth century. We watch as the young Anthony Curtis (Larenz Tate) graduates from high school, goes to prom, and is introduced to the illicit lifestyle of his surrogate father Kirby (Keith David). These opening sequences are effortlessly made and so, so captivating that all the pieces seem to be in place for the very black-centric masterpiece I have been yearning to see. Greatness seemed well within Dead Presidents’ reach.

Then the film goes to Vietnam, and everything starts to unravel.

There are some spoilers discussed ahead, so if you want to see the movie first without knowing where it goes you should stop here then come back afterward. If this does not apply to you, read on.

There’s nothing especially wrong with the story of Dead Presidents when you lay it out in outline form. The basic arc is this: Anthony grows up in the Bronx, then instead of going to college he joins the Marines and ships off for the Vietnam War. He goes through some ugly stuff while there, obviously, and then returns home to a child, a girlfriend (Rose Jackson) who may have been sleeping with someone else, and not a whole lot of money. This eventually leads Anthony and some of his friends to commit a robbery; the consequences of which prove to be irreparable. This is a reasonably good story, but once the film begins the Vietnam sequences it stops feeling real and starts feeling willed into being by the filmmakers. One of the things that annoys me most about a movie is a screenplay that moves the chess pieces around to fit its own agenda rather than letting the nature of the characters dictate where the story goes. For the first act of Dead Presidents, the Hughes Brothers and co-writer Michael Henry Brown do a fine job of establishing the characters and their environment. After that, they hijack the controls.

The flaws of the film aren’t merely the fault of the screenplay; a large part of the problem is that the Hughes brothers don’t do anything to make the Vietnam or robbery sequences anything but generic Vietnam and robbery sequences. There’s nothing in the Vietnam portion of the film that you haven’t seen in a million other war movies, and when a soldier played by Michael Imperioli heads off by himself into the woods, we know exactly what’s going to happen. The characters suddenly become stereotypes, and by the time Anthony makes the choice to kill Michael Imperioli and save him from the pain, Dead Presidents was starting to lose me. The film had spent a lot of time building up a handful of interesting characters only to stick them in the middle of a run-of-the-mill Vietnam movie.

Things get a little bit better when Anthony comes back home after the war, but by that point I had already accepted that the film would not reach its full potential. My hopes that Dead Presidents would be a great chronicling of the black experience died along with Michael Imperioli in Vietnam. Yet the film becomes even more disappointing when we get around to the robbery of the armored car at film’s end, at which point the Hughes Brothers turn their movie into a graphic, hyper-stylized yet painfully rote crime movie depicting events as they would never happen in real life. As Siskel and Ebert said in their review of the film all the way back when the movie came out:

Ebert: The story left me feeling like I had climbed a step and then stepped off into thin air. It ends in a caper scene. It belongs in a heist movie. […] The whole ending is just a cop out. If you’re going to have an arc, start with the life and show how the life might actually really develop if it wasn’t in a movie. 

Siskel: Not all veterans pull movie bank jobs. Most of them imploded.

Ebert: A lot of them might have walked into a bank with a gun to stick it up but very few of them had a job that looks like it was choreographed, frankly, by movie directors.

It’s reviews like theirs that likely led to the movie getting dismissed, and as a result it has drifted into the background as just another movie that came out in 1995. I do not resent this, as every last one of their criticisms is correct. After a while, I started to wonder whether the Hughes Brothers had made Dead Presidents to tell a coherent story or to check various film genres off the list. In this movie, they get to put together war sequences and heist sequences, and while they do both skillfully on a technical level they completely ring false within the context of the film's events. My ideal Dead Presidents is one that does exactly what Ebert mentions above: create the characters, and let them dictate where you take their story from there. The Hughes Brothers didn’t do that. They had the entire movie all planned out, and they stuck the characters in there just for the heck of it.

As much as I have spent the majority of this blog post taking this movie down, I have written about Dead Presidents because I see it as a film that deserves to be remembered; flaws and all. There need to be more movies that have the ambition and the noble intentions of Dead Presidents, and while I am disappointed with where the film ends up I still have a fondness for what it tries to do and what it represents. We need more movies like it, though I hope filmmakers do not directly replicate it. We should remember it for all it does right while also acknowledging what it does wrong. Dead Presidents is exactly what I meant when I said I wanted more movies about the African American community that takes their issues seriously without regard for how a single, charitable white person may help them. It is still an important film that deserves to find a second life, even if it isn’t all that great.