"Every dope fiend out here is chasing after something and never quite getting it." - Clarke Peters as Fat Curt
The Corner DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
The Corner, an HBO miniseries directed by the actor Charles Dutton, explores the lives of residents in a drug blighted West Baltimore neighborhood in 1993. The corner is literally the hub of the neighborhood. Dealers wait there for users to drive in from better parts of the city. Drug addled residents walk by looking for a handout or a cheap score to help ease the pain of their futile lives. Children pass within feet of drug buys on their way to the neighborhood's community center. It is a heartbreaking place, all the more so because The Corner is actually based on a true story.
Gary McCullough (T.K. Carter) is a smart, decent man who cannot even bring himself to say a curse word. He is also hopelessly addicted to drugs. Gary is terribly smart - he once had a promising career, held high paying jobs, and even had a college scholarship. Gary was forced to drop out of college in order to marry his pregnant girlfriend Fran (Khandi Alexander). Gary got a job to support his family, but Fran's increasing drug use began to sour their relationship. As their marriage ended, he, too, turned to drugs. Even now, years after their divorce, he reads chemistry textbooks and works of literature both for fun and to broaden his knowledge. His need for drugs, however, overrides everything else.
Their sixteen year old son, DeAndre (Sean Nelson) deals on the corner with members of his gang. Life is so invaluable on the corner that when DeAndre and his cousin find a stolen bulletproof vest, he puts it on and has his cousin shoot him to test whether or not it works. When his girlfriend Tyreeka (Toy Connor) gets pregnant, he briefly flirts with trying to go straight, but the pull of easy money is too great. He begins to sample his own wares, and the cycle begins again.
Flashbacks give us a glimpse of how the family went from living in a beautiful Victorian row house to using the bombed-out shell of the same home as a place to stash drugs and to shoot up. There are, however, no easy answers.
The miniseries posits that there are no true good or bad guys in the war on drugs. It acknowledges that the characters' lives and circumstances play a large part in their drug problems, but also admits that personal choices and lack of will are also a factor. The cops try to keep drugs off of the street (the older ones remember what the neighborhood was like before crime took over), but at the same time they are deaf and blind to the neighborhood's other problems, and they are often callous in their treatment of its denizens, resenting the people they are sworn to protect.
The series is also infused with mordant humor. In one scene, Tyreeka asks DeAndre for $200. She supposedly needs the money to cover an abortion, but she does not really plan on having one. DeAndre then asks his mother for the money, who in turn asks her brother, but with each request, the cost for the abortion nearly doubles.
The Corner is filled with memorable performances. T.K. Carter is terrific at portraying Gary's bleary-eyed intellectualism. When stealing a refrigerator from a home with a friend, the victim's neighbor discovers the theft and demands a cut of the profits. This neighbor-against-neighbor moral decline upsets Gary, but he is unable to recognize that his own behavior is just as bad.
Khandi Alexander also delivers an incredible performance. Best known for her more glamorous roles on Newsradio and E.R., Alexander delves so far into the role of Fran that she is barely recognizable. Her depiction of Fran's struggles to kick drugs and start a better life for herself and her children is brilliant. As she begins the Byzantine process that addicts must go through in order to get into rehab, it is hard not to shout words of encouragement at the screen.
Each episode opens and closes with documentary style interviews with one of the characters. While this does help to remind us that what we are seeing is based on a true story, it often comes across as an acting exercise. This is especially true of the interviews that close each episode. These interviews often interrupt the flow of the series, muting the effect of the shows' final scenes.
At the series' end, we are given updates on what happened to the real life people behind the characters. Dutton also returns to the corner for a final interview, but this time with the real Fran, Tyreeka, and DeAndre. As bleak as the miniseries is, the final moments of the interview leaves viewers with a glimmer of hope that the cycle can be broken.
The six episodes that make up the miniseries are divided onto two discs. Each episode is divided into six chapters.
