In Hollywood’s new tread-lightly landscape, no film has offered a better test of whether moviegoers are ready for raw evil than the new film “Training Day.” As the country lionizes firefighters and police nationwide, Washington’s new movie presents at its center a Los Angeles cop so corrupt he breaks just about every law down to jaywalking. Given a chance to be a hero and rescue civilians, Det. Sgt. Alonzo Harris would rather steal someone’s drug money. He plants evidence, fakes search warrants, traffics in stolen merchandise and threatens his own partner with a gun. Could this movie’s timing be any worse?
In some ways, it couldn’t be any better. While the events of the past three weeks have altered the country’s priorities, police corruption was a recurrent news headline well before the Sept. 11 attacks. From Southern California to Miami to New York City, police officers have been implicated in sometimes horrible crimes against those they are charged to protect. “Training Day,” in other words, merely reflects the evolution of the Los Angeles Police Department from the hagiography of the 1960s television series “Dragnet.” The fact that Warner Bros. moved “Training Day’s” release date from Sept. 21 to Oct. 5 was as much a consequence of postattack decorum than advertising: the studio felt it could not adequately promote the film while TV stations, magazines and newspapers offered saturation terrorism coverage.
“Training Day” is far more than a quick exploitation of recent police misdeeds. Indeed, the movie was conceived in 1995 and started filming well before the most terrifying details of Los Angeles’ Rafael Perez scandal became public. Perez, an officer in the LAPD’s Rampart station house, has been convicted of stealing about $1 million in cocaine and linked to planted evidence and the shooting of unarmed people. In “Training Day,” rookie police officer Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) is paired with Harris, a 13-year veteran. Over the course of just a few hours, Hawke’s character must decide if he will chuck his idealism and adopt Alonzo Harris’s to-hell-with-the-rules mantra: “You have to decide if you’re a sheep or a wolf. It takes a wolf to catch a wolf.”
The movie is rooted in the real experiences of screenwriter David Ayer, who grew up in a South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where he witnessed police harassment. “People would read the script and say, ‘You don’t know anything about law enforcement.’ They just had no idea that cops behaved that way. But they did,” Ayer says. “[Where I lived], it was old-school LAPD tactics. Get in your face and kick your ass. There are a lot of Alonzos out there. On the other hand, I met cops who really wanted to do the right thing–and it was heartbreaking. Because they don’t have the tools to do anything.”
Director Antoine Fuqua (“The Replacement Killers,” “Bait”) saw in Ayer’s screenplay a classic good-versus-evil battle with contemporary relevance. “When I first read it, I knew it was real,” the director says. “And when I was making it, I kept telling myself, ‘Someone needs to tell this story–the riots in Cincinnati, the Abner Louima case in New York, the Rampart scandal’,” Fuqua says. He tried to enlist the LAPD to help make the movie, but the department, not surprisingly, refused. If you look closely, you will see minor details–such as the actual LAPD police badge–are fake. But Fuqua doesn’t want the movie to be read as an attack on law enforcement or a condemnation of strong-arming. Instead, he suggests, it is a story of hubris, and one rogue officer who finally goes too far. “Alonzo’s mistake is his ego–that he starts to believe his own myth. That’s his fatal flaw. He starts to enjoy the power. And all of a sudden, you start crossing the line. Jake is the guy who reminds us there are still people out there who believe in the right thing.”
Washington, the veteran of “The Hurricane,” “Glory” and “Remember the Titans,” relished playing a character as villainous as his earlier screen roles were virtuous. It’s not that the actor has rejected sinister characters before, he says. It’s that he never had a chance to play them. “It wasn’t like I was avoiding it,” Washington says. “Nobody asked me to.” Having now played a heavy, he’s floating on air. “The bad guy is sexier. I had a great time. We was crazy.”
Unlike most action films, “Training Day” has received the critical attention usually reserved for art-house movies, as its accomplished execution generated invitations to prestigious film festivals in both Toronto and Venice. Washington hopes that audiences remember the film is not intended as a polemic but should be seen as entertainment. “This is just a movie, but it does raise questions,” the actor says. People who dismiss it as fantastic, Washington cautions, need to think back to the various police misconduct cases from the last few years.
The question now is whether subsequent current events–the terrorist attacks–will overshadow the film’s relevance. Fuqua, for one, believes his movie will be hurt. “When you see the men in blue doing such heroic things, it’s bad for the film,” he says. “But I hope the audience will look at it and see it’s also about one guy, Jake Hoyt, trying to do his job with integrity.” Last week, moviegoers were ready for the violence of “Don’t Say a Word.” Maybe with “Training Day,” audiences will continue to defy expectations.
