Review

The Central Park Five

Rating: Five stars

-----------------------

There are few documentary experiences more satisfying — and infuriating — than seeing a grotesque miscarriage of justice brilliantly dissected, especially when master PBS documentarian Ken Burns is on board. This is the case here, and why the audience at the first of this film’s two festival showings erupted into applause. Burns co-directed the film with his daughter Sarah and her husband, David McMahon. It’s based on her book about one of America’s most horrific crimes. The Central Park Five is the story of five Harlem teenagers who were framed for the brutal rape and near-fatal beating of the so-called Central Park Jogger — a 28-year-old white woman — on April 19, 1989. Although this meticulously researched crime story plays at times like a hybrid of a top-shelf Law and Order episode and a 48 Hours special, Team Burns takes it far beyond such mimicry. The filmmakers expertly combine archival footage of news reports, taped interrogations, interviews with journalists, a juror, law enforcers, the late mayor Ed Koch and the five accused. Shocking revelations are shrewdly time-released, intercut with reflections on the sociological implications, resurgence of racial tension and the sensational tabloid headlines the notorious crime inspired in New York while the Twin Towers were still standing and when a pre-Disneyfied 42nd Street was its seamy old self. When he isn’t making references about how he reluctantly has to use the word “alleged” with his trademark sarcasm, we also see Koch sing the praises of NYPD detectives before they were accused of bullying the youths, clearly dazed, confused and exhausted as seen in police videotapes, into giving false confessions so they could “go home.” This gripping, smartly edited film also persuasively implies legal ineptitude, reveals serious flaws in the criminal justice system and takes the media to task for selective reporting while effectively flashing back to the sights and sounds of a panic-stricken city rushing to judgment. Ironically, the quintet, now in their 30s and having served |considerable time before their exoneration that prompted a federal lawsuit against the city, are back in the limelight, presumably with a more positive outcome.

© Copyright 2013