‘The Inspection’ Review: Ex-Marine Elegance Bratton Gives Military Realness in Autobiographical Debut
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film Critic “If we got rid of every gay man in the military, there would be no military,” a sympathetic officer tells Marine recruit Ellis French in “The Inspection.” That’s an exceptionally open-minded take on the United States’ “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, seeing as how pretty much everyone else French encounters at boot camp is openly hostile to there being a gay man among them.
But writer-director Elegance Bratton made it through the system — like the character, he’d been lost and homeless for a decade before enlisting — and this deeply personal narrative debut is one gay Black man’s way of showing how he not only survived the experience, but was strengthened by it. “The few, the proud,” as they say.
To play himself — er, French — Bratton tapped Emmy nominee Jeremy Pope (“Hollywood”), soon to be seen as Basquiat on Broadway in “The Collaboration.” Pope gives a career-igniting performance in the role: a man who hopes, for a split second, that the uniform might make his straight, but can’t hide how the experience makes him feel when the men are all showering together — a biological reaction for which he’s beaten mercilessly by his fellow recruits.
Pulling himself up, again and again, after such humiliations amounts to a rite of passage for French, who has much to prove to himself and the incurably homophobic single mother who raised him (Gabrielle Union, just wrenching in the pair of scenes that bookend the film).
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