I saw this movie a couple days ago and enjoyed the acting, but walked away with an interpretation that probably differs from most people who fall in love with these types of movies.

My interpretation:

• The movie is less about Sonny (Al Pacino’s character) and more about a gullible and capricious public that is fooled by him.

• The public initially cheered him on because they imagined him to be some scrappy working class Robin Hood sort who was robbing a bank as part of some larger, noble cause. They had very little reason to see him this way, though. He yelled “Attica” a couple of times while pacing like an angry person; that was all that was needed to seduce them.

• Given the above, I see this as a study in how shallow and impressionable people can be when they are hungry for a certain narrative. New Yorkers at that time were clearly hungering for some kind of class-based revolution, and this movie captures this desire. But the hunger blinds them to truth and makes them do reckless things (like hanging around on the street all day, watching the proceedings of an armed bank robbery). And it causes them to celebrate a dangerous criminal.

• Sonny was not only delusional, criminal, and selfish, but his actions were not noble at all. He was robbing a bank to pay for his boyfriend’s sex change surgery (I had no idea the movie would have this twist)! Now mind you, this guy has a wife and two young kids, but he decides to throw his life away to “fix” his male lover’s body. He’s a cheater and a poor father, but the mob cheering him on aren’t curious enough to consider any of this.

• The heist ends with his partner being shot and Sonny being arrested. Not a surprising ending at all.

I know that me being a TERF makes me see everything through a terfian lens, but I can’t help but see this movie as a window into our current times:

• Sonny is comparable to trans activists who have taken up the T cause to an extreme extent. The TRA’s crusade to give the T “rights” has them now taking rights away from other people, not unlike Sonny taking money from other people. And they are just as delusional, selfish, and ignoble in their beliefs and actions.

• The gullible crowd in the movie are comparable to the so-called progressive allies who look on from afar and cheer on the TRAs, without caring to know or understand the deeper story. They hear the mantras (“Attica! Attica”) and clap on cue, because they are letting themselves be seduced by a narrative they want to hear.

• Sonny is delusional enough to think he can get away with the heist, but in the end, he and his partner fail. TRAs are equally delusionally and equally doomed.

Anyway, I have no idea if anyone else has seen this movie and has anything to say about it. I looked on Reddit to see the opinions and I was amused to see how surface-level the commentary was. But maybe I’m the one assigning too much depth to this flick.