Film Review: 88: A Political Thriller That Reflects the Paranoia of Our Modern Day [Tribeca 2022]

88 Review

88 (2022) Film Review from the 21st Annual Tribeca Film Festival, a movie written and directed by Eromose, starring Brandon Victor Dixon, Orlando Jones, Thomas Sadoski, Naturi Naughton, Michael Harney, Amy Sloan, William Fichtner, Shellye Broughton, Jonathan Camp, Eric Casalini, Vinny Chhibber, Kenneth Choi, Jeremiah King, Ben Lewis, Kelly McCreary, Anthony Lee Medina, Elimu Nelson, Brian R. Norris, Pegah Rashti, and Jill Remez.

In a slightly alternate version of our reality, Femi Jackson (Brandon Victor Dixon), a down-and-out analyst, is hired by One USA to be their new Financial Director. One USA, which is a Democratic super PAC, is gearing up fundraising for its preferred candidate (and former director) Harold Roundtree (Orlando Jones) as the 2024 Iowa caucuses close in. While Femi’s wife Maria (Naturi Naughton) isn’t particularly gung-ho for Roundtree, or any Democratic nominee for that matter (her introduction is with a voracious takedown of Black Panther as CIA apologia, after all), she’s happy at the promise of steady employment for Femi once again as he recovers from a rough bout of alcoholism.

Femi sees a bit of himself in Roundtree – or at least that’s what he’s told, sarcastically or not, from his financial blogger friend Ira Goldstein (Thomas Sadoski) – but more importantly, he doesn’t want to blow this second chance at a good career. He pores himself over One USA’s earnings, which brings up patterns among the donations … peculiar ones from singular people within the PAC’s funneled NGOs, and all in amounts that, in one way or another, add up to the number 88.

While far from being a numerologist Femi does find the coincidence very strange, yet his boss – the PAC’s director (Amy Sloan) – ultimately sees them as inconsequential to the their larger gains. Determined to find out more Femi employs Ira’s expertise to dig deeper into the donations. To their horror, they uncover 88’s significance in fascist symbolism and a potential dark money trail leading to a shrouded neo-Nazi org.

But it doesn’t add up – why would white supremacists want to put their money behind a Black Democrat for U.S. President? Determined to solve this conundrum of political optics and prevent Roundtree from potential fallout, Femi and Ira keep digging for the truth – but find that the way there is far from a straight and narrow path.

One of 88’s strengths is its firm sense of grounding. Even in its conspiracy-addled reality of The Parallax View meets Southland Tales, it never veers into either of those films’ hyperbolic mindsets. Eromose’s vision of 2024 America feels pretty tangible with its further corporatizing Democratic party, continuously unreckoned social tensions over police violence and racial inequality, and a burgeoning (ironic) hyper-awareness of identity politics due to its mainstreaming by neoliberal forces.

Granted, the film occasionally stays too grounded to the point of being didactic, with its talking-points-as-dialogue and history lesson info-dumps via slideshows – the latter of which recalls the work of Spike Lee, but Eromose’s presentations lack the same tenacious energy. Some of its rough technical aspects keep 88 grounded in the sense of feeling amateurish, too, with its overt use of fisheye lens irritatingly reminding us how perception can indeed be distorted.

Despite that, overall Eromose manages to keep things tempered just enough so that it truly feels like our own current reality with an ever-so-slightly exaggerated spin.

The characters aren’t larger than life, yet they have enough wit, gusto, flaws, and cynicism that allows them to play with quite the amount of relatability. Dixon carries most of the film with anxious grace, having both sardonic and earnest chemistry in his scenes with Naughton and Sadoski (who in their own turns bring well-rounded vitality to their roles). Even the supporting and small background characters evoke a sense of verisimilitude to their quick performances – like Jones as the patient and whip-smart (and possibly willfully ignorant) Roundtree, and Elimu Nelson as the desperate but heartfelt Gutierrez.

The plot’s palpable hints of a sinister political cataclysm bubbling beneath the nation’s surface is reminiscent of our own present day and the anxieties that we face living within late capitalism. It can sometimes feels like too much to process, but admitting that is itself a validation of the past six years’ common discursive thread: there’s so much going on, and it’s all stupid and terrifying in equal measure. 88 is just a reflection of the mess we Americans have gotten ourselves into when mind-warped public figures are too busy creating policies influenced by the wildest forum-brained fantasies that they fail to see how capital is reworking its prejudices behind the scenes for maximum economic control.

Maybe the film gets a bit too gleeful in its dourness but it’s never smug about it, and that makes 88’s cinematic reflection of Our Current Era one of the clearest (or least murky) ones yet.

Rating: 7/10

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