Broken Men, Broken Place ‘Low Winter Sun’ Gives Detroit a Leading Role Frank Ockenfels 3/AMC Mark Strong plays Frank Agnew, a Detroit homicide detective, in “Low Winter Sun,” the AMC drama that will have its premiere next Sunday. By DAVID CARR Published: August 2, 2013 Facebook Twitter Google+ Save E-mail Share Print Reprints DETROIT — Near the end of a July day here, the heat still hung close over St. Aubin Street, a boulevard of former urban glories being slowly pulled back to earth. Catherine Hardwicke, who was directing an episode of “Low Winter Sun,” the new series on AMC that will have its premiere next Sunday, had just finished shooting a scene at the impossibly ornate St. Albertus church. Now unsanctified and bereft of people, it once served up five Masses a day to its Polish parishioners. Arts Twitter Logo. Connect With Us on Twitter Follow @nytimesarts for arts and entertainment news. Arts Twitter List: Critics, Reporters and Editors Arts & Entertainment Guide A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics. Go to Event Listings » Enlarge This Image Rebecca Cook/Reuters Part of Detroit’s emptying urbanscape. Enlarge This Image Alicia Gbur/AMC Actor Lennie James from “Low Winter Sun.” Enlarge This Image Alicia Gbur/AMC “Low Winter Sun” actors from left, James Harvey Ward, Sprague Grayden and James Ransone. Enlarge This Image ABC From left, Michael Imperioli, Allen Maldonado and Jon Michael Hill in “Detroit 1-8-7.” Enlarge This Image Loki Films An image from “Detropia.” Ms. Hardwicke, whose credits include “Thirteen” and “Twilight,” stepped out of the cool confines of the church and into the haze to shoot an exterior scene down the street. She saw a kind of terrible beauty everywhere she looked. A flock of pigeons came to rest on a cratering roof in one direction; in the other, a fallow block framed the graffiti-encrusted last house standing. To call Detroit a shooting set in waiting is disrespectful to the people who still live and struggle here, but its physical aspects are authentically cinematic even absent the current crews, semis and generators. Ms. Hardwicke seemed to be walking through a television show as much as making one. “How could I not make something remarkable here?” she said. “When we drive or walk around, you see location after location that is amazing and heartbreaking at the same time.” The exterior shot features Frank Agnew, the lead character, driving slowly down an empty street. A hot wind kicks up a few stray raindrops that offer no relief just as Mark Strong, the British actor who plays Agnew, gets into the car. And then a character in ad hoc armor, who looks like an extra from “Mad Max,” ambles past the car on giant stilts, wearing a sign that reads, “Detroit, Rise Up.” As it turns out, the character is part of the shot, but there is often a very thin line between what is real and what is not in this forsaken place. Detroit, as everyone knows, is not just bereft, but now officially the largest American city to tip over into bankruptcy. Although its abasement is very much in the news, this is a city that has been in the process of dying for a very long time. During World War II, a strategic decision to decentralize production of cars and fighting vehicles sent jobs to burgeoning suburbs. Then the riots of the ’60s scarred Detroit more deeply than most cities, followed by an endless parade of self-proclaimed reformers turned municipal grifters who bled the city dry. In sum, those man-made forces have perforated this place more deeply than any natural disaster could have. Unlike Baltimore or Washington, where brick homes resisted decay, Detroit housing was built on the cheap, so much stacked firewood waiting for a match. It has been burning, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, ever since. Agnew is a broken man in a broken place who tumbles into moral hazard and deceit; Mr. Strong played the main character in the 2006 British mini-series of the same name from which this show is adapted. The American version opens on his face, a single giant tear lumbering down his cheek as he realizes he is about to help kill a fellow officer with his bare hands. “In that first scene, Frank is a good man who is about to murder a colleague,” Mr. Strong said, sitting in his trailer on set. “We wanted to get across what that meant as powerfully as we could. You are not trying to solve a murder in this show. We know who did it. He is crying about his lost life, a life gone completely wrong.” A city that has gone off the rails in much the same way, Detroit is a persistent character in not just “Low Winter Sun.” That series is one of a number of attempts to find meaning amid the rubble, including another cop show, “Detroit 1-8-7,” a series starring Michael Imperioli that came and went a couple years ago on ABC, a film feature, “Detroit Unleaded,” about young Arab Americans that’s making the festival rounds, and a number of documentaries, including “Detropia,” the startling 2012 documentary about the man-made disaster than slowly inundated the city. With cops and robbers making their way through a city that has been stripped of its civilizing aspects, “Low Winter Sun” might scan as the lost sixth season of the “The Wire,” but given the survivalist impulses at work and the bombed-out backdrop, the story has as much in common with “The Walking Dead” as a cop show. The show is closely focused on Agnew and his partner, Joe Geddes (Lennie James), two homicide cops who commit that signature crime on a deeply crooked fellow detective and then spend time trying to unsolve the crime. As perpetrators who are also investigators, they hide in very plain sight as Simon Boyd, an investigator from internal affairs played by David Costabile (the ill-fated chemist in “Breaking Bad), tries to pull back the covers on the entire conspiracy. “We loved the idea of Frank as a guy who is — literally and figuratively — trying to find himself within this story,” said Joel Stillerman, the executive vice president for original content at AMC. “And then once it was set in Detroit, the most inherently cinematic city in the country, which is both unfortunate and true, it really seemed like a story we could tell.” A dark story in a city falling in on itself might present some audience problems, but Mr. Stillerman noted that the show was opening immediately following the final season premiere of “Breaking Bad,” which has thrived on exploring human pathology. Mr. Strong’s character is a man of Detroit in all of its aspects: tortured but somehow resilient. Detroit is less than half as big as it once was, and the density that makes a city a city is gone. Nature, not man, seems like the dominant force here, and in the summer, the mix of weeds and former gardens on block after block suggests a kind of new agrarian present. With a retro shooting style that pivots from a hermetic two-shot to a vast urban landscape where the humans are tiny in relief, “Low Winter Sun” captures the loneliness the city can inspire. It’s hard not to see this place as an archaeologist might, gazing at the once-great civilization that flourished here. Now it’s gone. That persistent absence has made an impression on the crew that is making “Low Winter Sun”, including Mr. James, the British actor who plays Agnew’s co-conspirator, a cop trying to set his many bad deeds right. “Can you imagine what the place looked like in its heyday?” he said, looking up from a church pew into the soaring, rococo ceiling. “This church, this city, has seen better days, and so has my character. His redemption starts with a murder.” In the scene in the church, his character, who conned his unwitting fellow cop into passing a point of no return, enters the confessional and tells the priest: “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been about 18 years since my last confession. I lied. Cheated. Stole. Didn’t do right by the mother of my kids. Was a coward. Then ... I became a cop.” Realizing he has done things even a loving God might not forgive, he gets up, midconfession and exits. Both cops end up pulled into the undercity of Detroit, a place full of small-time hoods all playing the short con. Melanie Marnich, a playwright and a veteran of HBO’s “Big Love,” grabbed a bit of shade outside the church to talk about the show and the seventh episode, which she wrote. She said that the mayhem in Detroit opens opportunities for the characters — and for the writers trying to bring them to life. “They are scorpions in a box, hustling and looking for their shot,” she said. “Both the cops and the bad guys understand that when things break down, everything goes up for grabs.” Chris Mundy, who adapted the series for AMC, said that Detroit seemed like the only place for “Low Winter Sun,” a story about a breakdown in the natural order of things that begins with murder cops committing murder. “The whole show is about second chances and what the characters are willing to do to get a second chance,” he said during a stop in New York. “The people who are here will not give up Detroit, and as part of that, they have sort of doubled down on the pride of being from here.” You can find that counternarrative — of a Detroit rising and being rebuilt — right on the set of “Low Winter Sun.” Christos Moisides is the second unit director of photography, but he also owns the London Chop House, the downtown steakhouse that got a shout-out on “Mad Men” for the ultimate power dinner it used to serve during Detroit’s heyday. He came back to Detroit from Los Angeles after a juicy set of incentives lured filmmakers here. Those incentives have been reduced because of budgetary pressures, but he stayed. The restaurant is first rate, if short on business, and his family’s decision to buy it was less about stubbornness than recognizing Detroit for what it is, which is a remarkably screwed-up place that is full of remarkable people. And not a bad place to film, by the way. “We did a six-block car chase last week with all the tactical ops that requires, with a lot of ease and a minimum of disruption,” Mr. Moisides said. “I’d like to think we are making a kind of love story about the city, a complicated one, but life here is complicated like nowhere else.” The show has a large temporary production facility on East Grand Boulevard, amid the emptied-out industrial landscape of east Detroit. The production facility and office are next to the deserted Packard manufacturing site, one of the largest pieces of unoccupied urban real estate in this hemisphere. Charles Carroll, the producer of the show, has watched out his window as scavengers continue to nibble at the ancient production plant. “A lot of people came to shoot here in the past because of incentives, but we have the benefit of shooting Detroit for what it is,” he said. “This place has a chip on its shoulder and it’s hard to explain, but it’s a good chip on the shoulder. They aren’t cynical, just realistic.” Inside a nearby warehouse, an interior shot of the police headquarters is being filmed. Ira Todd, a Detroit homicide detective, is watching over the verisimilitude of the police aspects of the show. The scene has Agnew and Geddes grabbing the rising thug Damon Callis, played by James Ransone, and stuffing his head into a toilet. (“It’s not like that kind of stuff happens on the job,” Detective Todd notes.) Far from being beaten down by the city, Detective Todd sees it as a place where he can be a source of accountability and consequence. “The real cops in the city know who each other are,” he said. “We work together, regardless of the rest of it.” Toweling off after the toilet scene, Mr. Ransone is nonetheless happy about the job at hand and romanced by the setting. A veteran of “The Wire” and “Treme,” he has performed in his share of shows about the decline of once-great American cities. He suggested that “Low Winter Sun” fit in that emerging narrative, in part because “this is the place where the middle class was invented. It was where the American dream started with good paying manufacturing jobs.” “When you first get here, what has happened doesn’t seem real,” he added. “But I have come to love it here.” “The institutional decay is so systemic that Detroit is already living in the apocalypse,” Mr. Ransone said, the tattoos on his arms suggesting he has picked up and made his share of marks along the way. “In that context, the individual is free to decide his or her own destiny. People tend to fetishize the ruins here. But the freedom in the middle of them is very real.”
Posted on: Fri, 02 Aug 2013 20:12:37 +0000
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