Rosenberg: Brubaker (1980)

A kind of companion piece to Cool Hand Luke, Brubaker is based upon the notorious investigations into prison farms that took place in Arkansas in the late 1960s. In this version, Robert Redford plays Henry Brubaker – a loose version of penologist Tom Murton – who is appointed warden of Wakefield State Prison – based on Tucker State Prison – only to find that the prison is rife with exploitation, rape and decay, while the prisoners have been integrated into the local economy to a quite unprecedented extent – Tucker was the only American prison to turn a profit at this time – to the point where the prison itself has become the main employer in the surrounding county, even if its inmates aren’t paid or remunerated for their labour. In that sense, Wakefield quickly feels like the first fully privatised prison, a neoliberal trailblazer, while the film itself has the sober, sombre tone of a workplace drama, or a union drama, more than a prison drama per se. In fact, the prison is so collapsed into the surrounding county, so economically inextrixable from the state of Arkansas itself, that it doesn’t really  feel like a prison for most of the film – at least not exclusively – so much as the worst aspect of every national institution, from army barracks to reformatory school. Many of the inmates are in for their third or fourth round – they feel institutionalised before they even arrive – producing a casual, makeshift, domestic atmosphere in which the very idea of escape is purely notional – there is very little attention to the security thresholds that usually preoccupy most prison dramas – since it’s clear that this economy is largely self-regulating, with the prisoners themselves placed in key positions of trust and control in exchange for their labour, their silence and, in some instances, their blood. Yet this is also a prison escape drama in some sense, if only because Brubaker chooses to arrive at the prison as an inmate – the biggest single deviation from Murton’ story - in order to experience the deprivations first-hand before he accepts his new role as warden. From that moment on, every innovation, revision or reform feels like an escape effort, but it’s not exactly about escaping a discrete physical space in the manner of a more traditional or optimistic prison film – Wakefield is too amorphous for that – so much as escaping the prison as an institution, as well as escaping institutionalisation altogether. As might be expected, that pits Brubaker against both inmates and politicians, most of whom play as institutional types and only really “develop” by being gradually deinstitutionalised, resulting in an extremely wide cast that seems deliberately disorienting at moments. Such is the power of this particular institution, however, that nobody other than Brubaker is ever quite freed or exempt from it, with the the result that he is, in some sense, the only real character in the film. It makes sense, then, that Redford plays him as a presence as much as a character – from his calm, scrutinising gaze that presides over the opening scenes, his performance is all about body language, poses and gaits that command both respect and approachability, idealism and pragmatism. Viewed from afar – and the film tends to view him from afar, even in close-up – he’s a kind of liberal ideal, capable of translating idealism into direct action while never losing his noble ability to extricate himself from the institutions that seek to confine him in the name of pragmatism either. While it doesn’t quite make sense, then, to call it a fantasy – Murton did, after all, effect enormous changes – there is something slightly fantastic about Redford’s performance, a reckoning with his cult status as countercultural liberal on the verge of a new decade, that makes it feel like a coda to the first, great period in his career, and a fitting point of departure for what would be his longest gap between films to date.