Cargo – Review

The Bahamas, the present day: tour boat operator Kevin (Warren Brown) is at a low point in life. No-one’s paying to do tours on his tiny, run-down boat; he can’t afford the fees to keep his son in school; what little money he can scrape together he usually spends gambling on the Miami Dolphins; his rather shrewish wife comes from a wealthy background and regrets marrying down; and, perhaps worst of all, she may well have a point, given that at some point in the past, Kevin allowed her to take the wrap for his cocaine smuggling. He’s a scoundrel, but that’s not the worst thing he’s going to do in the picture. “I can fix things”, he’s fond of saying, because he suffers from Walter White syndrome – the misguided male need to provide for one’s family all by oneself, regardless of the moral lows to which one is forced to sink in doing so. To that end, he agrees – and not even reluctantly, fairly cheerfully – to use his crappy little boat for human trafficking. His horrid boss objects to the use of the term, given that the “cargo” isn’t slaves or sex workers, but Haitian refugees, and on that count I’m inclined to agree with the slimeball; it does make what Kevin’s doing sound worse than it is. Still, things aren’t as simple as they first appear, and the further Kevin wades into this ethical morass, the more despicable his actions become. Sometimes, this is because he has little choice in desperate, awful situations. Other times, he acts like a bastard simply because he can. Much more appealing, though slightly less engaging, is the film’s other protagonist, Celianne (Jessica Geneus). Like Kevin, she’s struggling to provide for her son. Unlike Kevin, she’s a) a woman, b) a (legal) Haitian immigrant, and c) basically decent as a person. Of course, she becomes one of the many people he hurts in the course of the narrative, but Geneus’ intelligent portrayal makes her a shining core of hope and humanity in an often depressing picture.

Race and nationality, social class and gender, and the awesome, transformative and destructive power of money, are everywhere in Kareem Mortimer’s film; more unusually, also evidenced is a nuanced understanding of the complicated interplay between them. “Race relations” is a term often lazily employed by lazy critics to describe the themes of intellectually lazy, if well-intentioned pictures. I won’t do Cargo the disservice of applying it. Major characters in his film include Bahamians and Haitians, Jamaicans and of course Americans, and the absurd yet intricate tapestry of rules governing the hierarchies of these people, is deftly depicted. In fact, the picture might be a little too intelligently-observed for its own good: it sometimes hints at being a sort of human epic, a challenging and difficult picture that would demand philosophical engagement, but for the most part is content to be a drama/thriller about Kevin’s moral degradation. In terms of story structure, this makes it compelling stuff, but it is also digestible, middlebrow stuff. In the film’s final third, Kevin makes the last boat trip of the film, and we see some pretty harrowing stuff go on. But it is in its first two thirds that it is at its best, in which the island is the real star of the picture, and we meet various characters, both charming and nasty, that we feel we’d like to know more about. The picture is the largest film project to date to come out of the Bahamas, and as a prestige piece it does its job admirably. But it wouldn’t hurt to see Mortimer try to pull off something even more ambitious.