Watching the cinematic adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son, it’s hard not to feel the ripple of James Baldwin’s and Ralph Ellison’s critiques of the celebrated author. For Baldwin and Ellison, although they never fully shunned their forebear, they claimed that Wright was a merely “sociological author,” one who was too invested in a mechanical image of African Americans as an environmental distillate, or those of subsequent critics who emphasize the way he can only imagine unmodulated oppositions between protagonist and environment.

But Wright’s was a moral materialism, a tragicomic vision of the heroic quest to survive in a brutal and unforgiving world that weaponizes us against ourselves and metastasizes even those avenues we prepare for our liberation as new modes of oppression. Wright’s friend and fellow author and expatriate Chester Himes ambiguously and unresolvedly labelled this “the notion”: that trick which mutates the impulse toward freedom into a mechanism of control, that turns desires for agency into easily manageable fantasies of command and dominance that are alternatives to real power.

Native Son cannot escape the notion. It doesn’t offer much, really, and it is more of a curio than a fully fleshed out feature film. As a protest against society, its modes of vocalization are somewhat superficial. As an artistic statement, it is wan and limited. Its failures, however, are not those of a mute cog in a machine or a prophet of resignation, but of a film, perhaps unaware of itself, producing itself as an avatar of its own limits. Native Son cannot escape the world around it. What it can do is visualize its own entrapment.

And entrapment, and the various modes of entrapment, are very much the question the novel, and the film, dramatize. Early in the film, its protagonist Bigger, a working class African American youth in Chicago, gets a job as a driver for the Thomas family, wealthy icons of new-money excess. Their daughter Vera (Lidia Alves) and her partner Jan (Communist in the novel, a generalized radical here) wish to paternalistically prove their sympathy for him, or, more generously, to show him the possibility of a world in which his color does not determine their attitude toward him (even if, of course, it is presently conditioning their affection for him). Exhibiting little discretion and much enthusiasm for the power dynamics that they cannot, on their own, overturn, they have him drive them to a Black night club for a time that is much more appealing to them than Bigger, who is constantly aware of his own presence and the potential for his white employers to besiege his freedom. Which is what happens when, returning home, a drunken Vera wishes to continue their liason and Bigger nervously puts a pillow over her face to quiet her when her blind mother Mrs. Hannah Thomas (Willa Pearl Curtis) inquires about the presence of another person in the room. While Bigger covers up the crime for a while, his crime is eventually discovered and he goes on the run with his girlfriend Bessie (Gloria Madison) while the world arrays itself against him.

And what of Wright himself? Wright was a stranger to the cinematic world, despite his infatuation with it. A lifelong cinephile whose descriptions of movie watching infuse Native Son and his underknown novel The Man Who Lived Underground with an alternately messianic and deflationary texture, his own screenplays were often rejected by Hollywood. While this no doubt contributed to his own blacklisting, there’s a certain ambivalence to Wright, who, even as he exposed America’s pretenses and limitations, was a self-proclaimed “Man of the West” who certainly felt excluded from a system he wishes to claim as his own. Doubly so given the fact that it is an Argentinian film, a production by a nation whose own relation to “the West” is knotted and complex, and the hiring of French director Pierre Chenal, who serves as the middleman for these tensions, even if he is not their resolution. Wright was so close to the material, and so infatuated with the opportunity to arrive in America via his participation in the medium of his, and the nation’s, affection, that the 40-year-old, who had lived many lives by that point, stepped in to play the youthful 25 year old who was just beginning to figure out his yet who wanted to be, and who acted like, he was wise beyond his years.

Wright looks every day of his 40 years on screen, and he feels at once 15 and 75. It’s an obvious mismatch, and yet so resoundingly apparent in its misfiring that it generates ripples of resonance. Wright never feels at home in the world depicted on-screen, even though he is playing a character he must have internally voiced hundreds of times, and that, he claims elsewhere cinema gave birth to. His palpable confusion makes Bigger out to be a man out of place and time. This is not a commanding authorial interpretation of his sovereign voice but a body wandering through space, looking for a truth he cannot fathom, divining revelations he may not fully believe much too late for his belief to help him.

While most of the other performers are limited in their ways, Wright alone transmutes that absence of skill into a real presence, not failing at a task he has been anointed with but uneasily existing within an identity he both wanted and rejected. It simultaneously animates his performance with real bodily force and enervates it, turning him at times into a brick wall, at others into an open wound. He seems not to be alive in this body, and certainly never one with it. He feels like a husk forced through the motions of an ecosystem he cannot truly call home, more a performative deconstruction of the idea of African American alienness than a lived embodiment of it. Or, more accurately, an embodiment of black life as a performative deconstruction of what it means to live. This is a man pulverized by his awareness of the structures and layers constricting him and besieging him with entities he recognized as himself and yet not himself.

The later portions of the film harness Chenal’s own luxuriantly bleak visual texture to dimly evoke the world as a disquieting labyrinth of hesitantly felt sensations. In these moments, Native Son achieves a genuinely sociological gaze, not in the sense Baldwin and Ellison suggested but in the sense that Theodor Adorno wrote when he defends a cinema that “does not interfere with things but rather arranges them in a constellation akin to that of writing,”  one that gathers worldly forces and then embodies the problem of turning forces of control into mechanisms of liberation. Wright’s literature, so deeply informed by cinematic modes, was an attempt to etch a humanity out of the deepest wells of what, he well knew, often felt like a determined existence, one untroubled by the possibility of human agency or creativity, and the film sacrifices itself to that existence. Only by poeticizing that limit, Adorno suggests, can an “aesthetics of the cinema” be a “sociology of the cinema,” and only by poeticizing our limits, Wright suggests, can we begin to develop a grammar attentive to the possibility of a real liberation.

Wright himself understood the tension between cinematic liberation and repression, creation and obliteration, and he always worked on the path to his version of not only a “sociology of the cinema” but sociology with the cinema. Writing on Bigger’s identity, Wright himself claims that he turned to cinema to “telescope” “alien facts” into “felt truth,” creating “new” and “unheard-of” “effects with words.” Wright’s idiom was filmic. It was a straight-shot, he felt, of modern complexity capable of rewiring the soul to experience and survive the unsettling whirlwinds of the modern world. Film alone could generate the “slow-motion” necessary to “feel” “the grain in the passing of time,” creating the “shadowy outlines of the negative that lay in the back of (the) mind.”

Cinema was revelatory, yet Wright also implies that it could be a mode of domination. In his essay “Memories of my Grandmother,” he asks, “Why should I not, like a scientist in a laboratory, use my imagination and invent test-tube situations, place Bigger in them, and, following the guidance of my own hopes and fears, what I had learned and remembered, work out in fictional form an emotional statement and resolution of this problem?” In this case, Bigger is a victim of Wright’s book, born to suffer as a sacrifice by an unseen force to expose the violence of unseen forces at prey in the world. And in his magisterial 1941 story “The Man Who Lived Underground,” Wright includes a key scene in which the protagonist, traversing a cavernous underground space, suddenly finds potential, ruptural salvation in a film theater: “Ahead of him glowed red letters: E-X-I-T. At the top of the steps he paused in front of a black curtain that fluttered uncertainly. He parted the folds and looked into a depth that gleamed with clusters of shimmering lights … a stretch of human faces … Dangling before the faces, high upon a screen of silver, were jerking shadows. A movie.” The film theater, a combination of abyssal darkness and sublime light, offers hope, but Wright finally promises only the illusion of a redemptive glow, a fantasy of messianic resolve. While he aspires to find in film “a certain heat … generated, like the blow of an Acetylene torch melting metals and fusing them together into one,” he ultimately proposes that cinema is no emancipation. This is an aesthetic sociology, one that, as Adorno claims, aspires to constellate a totality even as it wrestles with the dominating aesthetic hand necessary to do so. Wright, in other words, reminds us of the dangers of success, the tyranny of a clear and coherent vision.

Thus, if Native Son is dramatically limited, and the limits in the rest of the talent, especially the on-screen talents, are harder to write or feel away, it may be that the film can only turn its very failure into an artistic statement, to become a willful collaborator with its failures and try, not always successfully, to make something of them. If Native Son feels weirdly anodyne, like an assembly-line film with oddly, defiantly personal touches, many of them there almost in spite of themselves or because they were trying to be anonymous, it is only to say that the film catches some of the spirit of the novel. Or that the novel prematurely understood, and diagnosed, the problems with the film. Or that both may be true, and one and the same, and that the limits of artistic freedom, the impossibility of beauty in a determined world, become a soul-bearing purgative, a violence splayed out before us, rather than a summative artistic statement.

Score: 7/10