Michael Mann didn’t just
introduce himself to viewers with his first feature-length directing job. He
dazzled them. Arresting, emotional, and smart from its first frame to its last,
this made-for-TV drama delivers an unusual story with meticulous realism,
showcasing Mann’s signature tropes of a hip visual style, deeply felt character
work, and ingeniously integrated music. The picture also demonstrates why Mann
is virtually peerless in his depiction of the criminal mind, because he doesn’t
portray crooks as monsters—rather, he portrays them as self-aware professionals
ruled by strict codes.
Set inside a maximum-security prison, The Jericho Mile revolves around Larry
Murphy (Peter Strauss), a lifer who obsessively runs “fast miles” every day in
the prison courtyard. Isolated from all but a few fellow inmates, Larry lives
inside himself; the exhilaration of athletic challenge give his existence
meaning and structure. One afternoon, humanistic prison shrink Dr. Bill
Janowski (Geoffrey Lewis) clocks Murphy and realizes how fast the man is
moving, so he confers with Warden Earl Gulliver (Billy Green Bush). An
innovative penologist, Gulliver realizes that nurturing Murphy’s talent might
inspire other inmates to break the cycle of jailhouse profiteering and post-incarceration
recidivism. Gulliver invites a nationally ranked running coach, Jerry Beloit
(Ed Lauter), to observe and possibly train Murphy. After staging a race between
Murphy and several professional runners, Beloit declares that Murphy has
Olympic potential. Yet that’s only the surface of the story. Unfolding
concurrent with Murphy’s surprising odyssey is a grim drama involving powerful
inmate Dr. D (Brian Dennehy), who runs a jailhouse drug ring and gets into a hassle
with Murphy, which inadvertently sparks a prison-wide racial conflict.
Laced into all of this is a potent revelation of Murphy’s layers. We don’t
learn about the nature of his original crime until we’ve already become
invested in his journey, so Murphy emerges as a profoundly sympathetic
character—we’re able to root for him with full awareness of what he’s done, and
full awareness of his capacity for future violence. Presenting Murphy without
apologies might, in fact, be the greatest accomplishment of this fine film, so
it’s no surprise that Strauss took home an Emmy for his dimensional
performance, or that Mann and co-writer Patrick J. Nolan shared an Emmy for the
picture’s outstanding teleplay. Yet on many levels, The Jericho Mile is most impressive as a compendium of all the
skills Mann had developed thus far as a writer-producer on episodic TV shows,
and that he would continue to embellish in his extraordinary feature career. He
uses editing and music to create vivacious rhythms; he shoots real locations
and sets equally well to conjure an engrossing sense of place; and he guides
actors toward naturalistic performances.
Character players including Bush,
Lauter, Lewis, and Roger E. Mosley do some of their career-best work here,
imbuing their roles with lively individuality. Dennehy, still very early in his
screen career, is animalistic and frightening, and Strauss achieves several
moving moments by channeling a volatile combination of compassion and rage.
(Strauss totally nails Mann’s trademark device of having criminals speak
without contractions to avoid misunderstanding, so he seethes when delivering
such lines as, “Man, I am into nothing! That is how I do my time!”) Plus, as he
so often does, Mann pulls the whole movie together with an ingenious musical
flourish, turning a Latin-ized version of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the
Devil” into Murphy’s searing theme song.
The Jericho Mile: RIGHT ON
