The plight of the homeless has been a challenging subject to put on screen. The fictionalized account in "Midnight Cowboy" and the true grit realism in "Streetwise" are excellent examples. In "Dark Days", writer and director Marc Singer follows the lives of a small group of displaced people living in the Amtrak tunnels in New York City. For most of this very sympathetic film, Singer tries to authenticate their existence. They have, after all, an independence that allows them to build and maintain their little houses, use free electricity, and take advantage of an occasional leaking water line. They are, by-in-large, current or previous drug users who seem to have the savvy to escape their squalor but don't. One tunnel dweller returns to his friends after finishing a residential drug rehab program where they still serve their favorite egg plant parmigiana. They excuse away their rodent infestation and their sunless days and nights by maintaining that the streets above them are much more dangerous and unhealthy. We meet the bubbly Greg and the emotionally bitter Tommy who have managed to stay in this encampment for some time even though they act like they could do better. There is Dee, remorseful that her two children died in a fire while she lives on her pitiful existence, trapped in a vicious cycle of crack cocaine use. Together they rummage garbage for leftover food and resalable items that an affluent New York readily gives out. In the end, the Amtrak authorities decide the shanty tunnel town must go and even the local homeless coalition gets into the act to move them away from an eyesore existence they were all willing to accept for so long. It is a radical departure from a film that, up to that point, romanticized rather than pitied their well established digs. The irony is that these homeless, now reestablished in comfortable apartments, all remark that their previous existence seemed like a bad nightmare. What a departure from the hostility they felt with being removed from the one environment they were the most comfortable. And what does "Dark Days" say about all the other homeless, living on the edge, who have not been challenged to see how life is really like on the other side.
