Sixty years in the business, and IS GOD IS finally made me do it !
I want to tell you something I have never told anyone: in sixty years of working and living in Hollywood — 40 years of premieres, screenings, junkets, festivals, and every conceivable kind of industry event and I have never once stolen a poster off a wall.
Until a few nights ago.
After the screening of Is God Is, I walked past the lobby display on my way out and I stopped. I looked at that poster for a long moment. And then I took it. Tucked it under my arm, and walked out like I’d done it a thousand times. I have not done it once before in my life.
That should tell you everything you need to know about what this film did to me.
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I’ve seen a lot of movies. A lot. It comes with the territory when you’ve spent your life in this business. And I’ll be honest with you — it has been a long time since I walked out of a screening and couldn’t shake it the next morning. Couldn’t shake it the morning after that either. Is God Is has been living in me since I saw it, and I’m still not entirely sure what to do with that.
The film, directed by Aleshea Harris in a remarkable debut, follows twin sisters — Racine and Anaia — who receive word that the mother they believed died in a childhood house fire is actually alive, badly burned, and on her deathbed. The fire was no accident. Their father set it. And their dying mother, whom the girls call God, has one final request for her daughters: make him dead.
That’s the premise. What Harris does with it is something else entirely.
“What this film is really about is the right to feel what you feel — fully, without apology, without someone deciding your reaction is too much.”
— BRIAN MEDAVOY
I’ve been around long enough to know when a filmmaker is doing something genuinely new. Harris fuses Greek tragedy, Black Southern gothic, and a kind of spaghetti western rhythm into a story that shouldn’t hold together on paper — and onscreen it is absolutely riveting. The performances, particularly Kara Young as the fire-driven Racine and Mallori Johnson as the more inward Anaia, are the kind you remember years later. Sterling K. Brown, as the father they call Man, is quietly terrifying in the way only truly great acting can be.
And then there is Mykelti Williamson. I’ll be transparent with you: Mykelti is my client, and has been for some time. But I want to be equally transparent about something else… I would be writing these exact words whether he was or not. He plays Man’s shady lawyer, a character who carries one of the film’s most harrowing secrets, and what Mykelti does with that role in a relatively limited amount of screen time is extraordinary. He makes you feel the weight of every year that man spent compromised, complicit, and cornered. It’s the kind of performance that reminds you what it looks like when a truly gifted actor is given material worthy of them. I’ve believed in Mykelti’s brilliance for a long time. Watching this film, I was proud all over again — and honestly, a little grateful that the rest of the world gets to see what I already knew once again !
But what I can’t stop thinking about what followed me home and apparently drove me to minor theft…. IS is what the film is actually about.
✦
In six decades of working with talent, I’ve sat across the table from a lot of people who’ve been told, in one way or another, that what they’re feeling is too much. Too angry. Too raw. Too honest. And I’ve watched what happens to people who spend a lifetime learning to make themselves smaller so that others are more comfortable.
Is God Is refuses that bargain entirely. It asks a harder question: what does it cost a person to suppress righteous anger for years and years? What does it look like when that rage finally has nowhere left to go but out?
Harris isn’t making a film that celebrates violence for its own sake. She’s making a film about reckoning. About what happens when people who have been denied justice for a very long time decide they are done waiting for someone else to deliver it. There is moral complexity here that Hollywood rarely allows its characters and almost never allows characters who look like Racine and Anaia.
That, more than anything, is why this film matters. And why it deserves to be seen.
✦
I’ve spent my career trying to find stories that tell the truth. Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes the business gets in the way of the truth and you do the best you can. But every now and then, something comes along that reminds you why any of us got into this in the first place — why stories matter, why cinema at its best is an act of radical empathy.
Is God Is is one of those films. It will shake something loose in you if you let it.
Go see it. And if there happens to be a poster in the lobby on your way out — well. I understand if you’re tempted.
