What David Simon returns to Baltimore, where he worked as a journalist for thirteen years and spends his acclaimed TheWire (2002-2008), and with George Pelecanos, who has collaborated with him ever since, is quite an event. Not only because that television series is considered the best in history and The city is our (since 2022), available on HBO Max, constitutes a promising revisitation of the thematic and stylistic milestone that it was, but because of how well they know the place.
Not in vain, what they offered us before and they offer us here is a commitment to apparent realism, the crudest and most plausible which can be reached in the seventh art, to present us with another recreation of police operations in their fight against crime and its concomitance with narrative manners for which, if they told us that it was a documentary, we could believe it. A proposal that, however, will not be able to build a cool social complex like TheWire unless it continues.
return the dynamic and punctual impressionist montage of urban scenes selected with the sheer ingenuity of those responsible, just as Terrence Malick chooses his in the beautiful dramas he shoots, punctuated with authentic and eloquent monologues of the protagonists. On this occasion, Jon Bernthal’s Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, who has previously played Shane Walsh in The Walking Dead (since 2010), to the Griff of BabyDriver (2017) or Frank Castle in The Punisher (2017-2019).
‘The city is ours’: the hyperrealism of David Simon and George Pelecanos
The structure that David Simon and George Pelecanos assign to The city is our looks like that of a confusing puzzle, with multiple pieces that it is not very well known how they will come together until they are gradually put in place, and the advances of the plot and its murky enigmas occur without haste or slowness. For this, they are used flashbacks with the aim of understanding the problematic situation in Baltimore and the attitude of certain characters.
Likewise, its realistic purpose, which generally leaves us with a sober planning of camera in hand and even fixed and without many movements of Reinaldo Marcus Green, reaches even the dialogueswhat they have not been written to chew the information out of the viewers absolutely. same as in TheWirewhat we hear could come out of the mouths of existing people, professionals from the different fields that are involved in the criminal plot, indistinguishable from those we see here.
If art imitates life, David Simon and George Pelecanos, who have also combined their talents to create Treme (2010-2013) with Eric Ellis Overmyer and The Deuce: The Times Square Chronicles (2017-2019), turns them, not just into the Diego Velázquez, but into the Leng Jun of television fiction own right. Something that, of course, they demonstrate again for what we speak with their hyperrealism almost documentalist in The city is our.
A gift for lovers of ‘The Wire’
This project could not be approached in any other way if we consider the involvement of these filmmakers and that what they show us they are real factsthose of one of the most notorious cases of police putrefaction in Baltimorewhich the former journalist Justin Fenton narrates precisely in the book We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops and Corruption (2021): the one related to the Weapons Tracking Task Force and the Wayne Jenkins of Jon Bernthal in front of it.
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The American actor builds, with a thousand and one nuances that can be seen in his own gestures and even in the way he walks, one of his round characters, disturbing in their unpredictable behavior. And what a pleasure to meet the big Delaney Williams in the shoes of Kevin Davis, an interpreter whom we value for his sergeant Jay Landsman of TheWire. the icing for that The city is our be revealed as the ideal work from HBO Max for those who love that awesome series.