‘Strong Island’: Doc Explores A Mysterious Murder [Review]

There’s an immediacy to Yance Ford’s chilling investigation “Strong Island” that runs the spectrum from bracing to uncomfortable. Even though Ford comes at the subject sideways, not immediately clueing you into what story is being told, there is nothing remote about how things begin. Ford appears, trying to question over the phone the prosecutor who decided not to press charges in the April 1992 fatal shooting of Ford’s brother, William Jr. Wanting answers to the questions that “have been plaguing me for 22 years,” Ford gets a straight “No” to every one of his queries. Then we see Ford’s mother Barbara Dunmore, a striking woman with short silvery hair, warm eyes, and a dramatically measured voice. She recalls wondering, “how will our life go on without him?” before telling herself that she should wait “until we get to court … this death isn’t going to be in vain.” But the Ford family never had their day in court. “Strong Island” is Ford’s attempt to grapple with the open wound left behind.

Dramatically composed for a first-time filmmaker, “Strong Island” is a story about a murder. But Ford zeroes in on the story of the family and what the murder did to them. So instead of a brief run-through of the family particulars, Ford constructs an entire family album of old photos — often laying them out on bright white backgrounds, whose stark directness mirrors Ford’s shooting and speaking style — and reminiscences from Barbara, whose stentorian pace stiffens everything with a rich gravitas.

Yance’s parents met and married in South Carolina before moving to Brooklyn. Thinking they had escaped Jim Crow, the Fords made a good life in the city. Barbara was a teacher and William Sr. worked as a driver on the subway. With steady jobs and a growing family, first William Jr. and then two younger siblings, the Fords moved out to Long Island just like many other families leaving the city’s increasing crime. They were a proud family, and when Barbara points out that her mother “stripped tobacco for living,” it seems incredible that she could have escaped the grinding poverty and institutionalized racism of the Old South to establish this new life in just one generation.

But the dark matter underneath the surface of “Strong Island,” well before Ford starts digging into the killing and its aftermath, is the very real possibility that they didn’t escape. Where the Fords settled, in Central Islip, was one of the few black enclaves in Long Island. Still, the memories of William Jr.’s friends here, as well as his adoring younger sister Lauren, don’t reveal much anxiety about their segregated situation.

A car accident changed all that. The vehicle that 24-year-old William Jr. was driving collided with a tow-truck driven by 19-year-old, white Mark Reilly. William Jr. agreed not to report anything so long as Reilly fixed the car at the dodgy body shop he worked at. Repairs dragged on, and a confrontation at the shop resulted in Reilly shooting William Jr. with a rifle, mortally wounding him.

After his initial description of the murder, Ford circles back to the beloved William Jr. His story comes in fragments — an anecdote here, a yellowed snapshot there. We learn of his brief time at Howard University in the 1980s, his homesickness, a spell working as a teacher with Barbara out on Rikers Island, and his punishing plan for losing weight so that he could become a corrections officer. While coloring in this portrait, Ford tells the agonizing story of justice delayed and deferred as the police and DA act as though no murder has occurred. Barbara’s crisp and vivid description of giving her testimony in front of an all-white Grand Jury, some of whom are reading while others are chatting, is as harrowing as it is infuriating.

The deliberate pacing of “Strong Island” goes against the grain of many charged-up modern procedural documentaries. It brings a fatalistic cast to a story whose disturbing facts more than earn it. Ford shoots his subjects straight on in a formally composed manner that gives them the aspect of painted figures. When Ford is on screen, the background is frequently darkened and Ford’s voice grim and slow. The details of the shooting could have been studied in more granular detail, particularly in light of a surprising and highly relevant detail Ford reveals about William Jr.’s life late in the movie.

But, in this movie’s richly textured and calmly infuriated manner, Ford could be saying that such forensics are beside the point. That the shooting of a promising and beloved young black man went unanswered is tragedy enough. What rippled out from that silence is another tragedy altogether, as grief overtook the Fords’ tidy little split-level. This is cinematic intimacy in the best manner for the worst of all reasons. [A-]