Set in Philadelphia's summer of 1976, Night Catches Us opens with the sound of Jimmy Carter's voice wending through an urban neighborhood, planting the usual, soft promises as it passes. His vow to give power back to the people is, I imagine, why first-time writer and director Tanya Hamilton pulled that particular clip from the teeming archives: It adds a layer of situational resonance to her story of the last days of the Black Panther movement, before that story even begins.
Hearing Carter campaigning also helps pinpoint a melancholy, disappointed moment in time. Into that moment walks Marcus (Anthony Mackie), a mysterious young man whose homecoming sends ripples through the community, a former nerve center for radical activists. Among his fraught relationships is the one he has with Patricia (Kerry Washington), a young lawyer who runs both her house and her legal practice as a haven for black men in trouble. But a credible context doesn't guarantee a compelling narrative: The movie is set in the past in more ways than one, and instead of telling a story, too much of Night Catches Us gestures cryptically toward one that has already happened. It's a structure that saps tension from the events at hand, which instead of building feel more a part of an extended denouement.
Marcus returns to Philadelphia for his father's funeral, and to help with the house his nonplussed and recently converted Muslim brother Bostic (Tariq Trotter, whose band, The Roots, provide the beat-driven, evocative soundtrack) has already put on the market. Nobody likes Marcus, but then it seems there's plenty of bad blood to go around: The first 20 minutes comprise a drab progression of contentious face-offs, between Marcus and Bostic, between Marcus and the local Panthers (who brand him a "snitch"), between Patricia and Marcus (who may or may not have been lovers, and will definitely become lovers), between Patricia's young cousin Jimmy (Amari Cheatom) and the beat cops dogging him, and between Jimmy and Patricia.
Washington is well cast as the clipped, deflective den mother; responsibility gives Patricia purpose and possibly distraction, though a finely turned ambivalence haunts her actions and interactions. She is the fully integrated nexus around which Marcus, Jimmy, her prominent attorney suitor Carey (Ron Simons), and her wary daughter Iris (Jamara Griffin) orbit. Radiant in conception, Patricia's character is often asked to absorb cryptic, declarative statements: "I know it was hard when I left," Marcus says during one of their tense, initial conversations. "But I had to go." "You're living in the past, Patricia," Carey says, right before he hits the bricks. "This house, this neighborhood -- you're all fighting imaginary enemies."
Meant to pique and hold our attention, the script's strategy of opening up blanks so that it can eventually fill them in contributes to a feeling of inertia, in part because three-quarters of the film pass with vague references to what sounds increasingly like a more interesting story. Contributing to the problem is the fact that several of those blanks, like those alluding to the history between Marcus and both his brother and a crooked detective played by Wendell Pierce, remain unresolved.
Most successful are the scenes involving Marcus and Iris, a 10-year-old girl who grew up fatherless and watchful of her tumultuous surroundings. What this moment -- encompassing her mother's sacrifices, the change that's coming in fits and starts, the father figures who come and go -- might mean for Iris's future is a plane Hamilton accesses and surveys effortlessly. The decade-earlier death of Iris' father, Neil -- he's seen only in a framed photograph -- lies at the heart of Hamilton's elliptical plotting and breadcrumb allusions. Hamilton devotes a great deal of effort to veiling and then unveiling that mystery; I came to wish she'd channeled that energy into the veins of her story that are more viable, and most alive.