Florentine Films
119 min., dir. by Sarah Burns, Ken Burns, and David McMahon, with Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Antron McCray

As a sheltered nine-year-old living in the quiet suburbs of Long Island, even I felt the shock-wave of this infamous 1989 incident. While jogging through New York’s Central Park around 10 p.m., as she always did, a woman was violently attacked, raped, and beaten into a coma. Five kids (four black, one Latino) ranging from ages 14 to 16 were tried and convicted of the crime. All but one served their full sentences of seven years each, while the eldest suffered a loner sentence of 15 years. The five kids always maintained their innocence, and it wasn’t until 13 years later that someone else (someone the police let slip by) came forward and confessed to the crime.

Much like the revealing films about the West Memphis Three, The Central Park Five is a documentary about police and politicians under immense pressure to have someone answer for such an atrocious crime, ultimately convicting innocent youths based solely on shaky, coerced confessions for a crime they didn’t commit. The total sum of the collected evidence couldn’t place the boys at the scene of the crime; furthermore, all of their “confessions” contradicted one another, and most of the five boys were extremely shy. None of that mattered — the prosecution had the people they wanted to pin it on, and it would stay that way.

There are two specific points of insight the film provides that sent the chills running down my spine. First, Raymond Santana, Sr., the father of the one Latino child to be convicted, looks almost directly at the camera and states that if it weren’t for him, his boy and two of the others wouldn’t have even been in the park that night. Santana felt that the street corner the kids hung around was too dangerous due to the drug trade, and suggested that his son instead head to the park where things were quieter. Little did he know his son and his two friends would wind up meeting with a group of 20 to 30 other kids who were terrorizing the park that night. Even though none of the Central Park Five participated in the nighttime shenanigans, their proximity to the scene of the crime shone a light on them after the jogger was found. It should also be stated that, while criminally rowdy, no one associated with this large crowd had anything to do with the rape.

Next, the one juror who seemed to hold on out submitting a judgment of guilty on these young kids ran down the process of how he ended up changing his mind. The deliberation went on for more than 10 days, with this one man trying to point out that none of the confessions matched the others. Finally, after being beaten down with exhaustion and realizing that no one was listening to him, he voted guilty. This is a brilliant firsthand illustration of the torturous lambasting a 14-year-old goes through when he is interrogated for more than 24 hours and forced into giving a false statement admitting to doing something he didn’t do. The juror was just telling his story, but the contrast of the two events in the film is excellent.

These are brutishly human moments — moments most people will never experience in their own lives. The circumstances are upsetting, but the pain and outrage we as an audience experience is still beautiful. The Central Park Five won’t make you smile or cheer at any point as it remembers a New York City that seems so long ago. Still, it only can work as a force of righteousness in aiming to help prevent these miscarriages of justice in the future.

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Matthew Schuchman is the founder and film critic of Movie Reviews From Gene Shalit’s Moustache and the contributing film writer for IPaintMyMind.