Movie Reviews: Epic Wednesday Ghetto Life
I’m more Gilmore Girls than ghetto, of course, and so I can’t say that the realism of the movie really struck me or that I felt a spiritual connection with the characters or anything like that. Yeah, good stories are universal, but there’s a certain wall between me and this kind of life that sort of absents me from having anything real to say about it.
I know narratives, though, and this was a good one. The threads of the story were woven quite skillfully together, what seemed to be isolated incidences reverberating later, until they all came together in one explosive tangle. (Does that work?) There was also a nice parallelism with Caine’s childhood and Anthony’s, including the nearly-identical scenes on the stoops. The guy who will eventually be Anthony’s father teaches Caine how to be a thug; years later he finds himself in the same situation in the opposite role, with a kid at his feet. I don’t know what to make of the fact that he didn’t speak at all, and waited for Ronnie, Anthony’s mom, to come out and rescue him.
It is a bit puzzling—though moments in the film were clearly telegraphed from the get-go (I’m at home saying, “Someone’s gonna die right about now, I don’t know who, but…”), other moments were more careful and ambiguous. The character of Ronnie (Jada Pinkett later Smith) was the biggest puzzle, for me. In fact, she seemed to exist in a different movie altogether. She complained that Caine had become hardened, but how was she living in this environment without being hardened herself? How was she not filled with the rage that was fueling everybody else? “Do cops hate us?” her kid asks her and she says, “no, of course not, it was a misunderstanding.” That’s an extremely generous view to take of things—where is she drawing that strength from? Caine’s grandparents are explicitly drawing their optimism from their religious faith; Ronnie didn’t seem to have devoted herself to anything in that way.
Maybe we were supposed to understand that she had devoted her energy to Caine himself, who was a pretty questionable idol, seeing as he became more and more of an ass throughout the film. Was it for his benefit that she invited all those thug guys to her house for her going-away party? She couldn’t be friends with them if all she does is hassle them about their lifestyles and what they’re smoking and the kind of role models they are for her son. Just don’t invite them, Ronnie.
Spike Lee, and Michael Jordan wannabes, after the jump.
This is a very different kind of neighborhood than the one from Menace II Society. This is New York (Brooklyn) versus L.A. (Watts), and whereas that one was basically a war zone, this one is more respectable. Where that one was populated almost entirely by African Americans, this one has a mix of blacks and whites who look at each other with suspicion. Where Menace II Society had nobody who seemed to have any kind of reason to be anywhere or do anything, several characters in Do the Right Thing actually have jobs. And that’s where the story is centered, around a pizza place, owned and operated by an Italian man and his two sons, and patronized almost solely by the African-Americans who live there.
When Crash came out a few years ago, I found it a bit strained. It seemed like every character made every argument immediately about race. I think in the screenwriter’s eagerness to show the tensions that simmer underneath the surface, they forgot that people sometimes have disagreements that are unrelated to race. There was no reason, for example, for Jennifer Esposito’s character to spit out a racial slur because she got into a fender bender with an Asian person. The movie wanted to indicate to us that those kinds of statements are on the tips of our tongues all the time. Maybe I’m naïve, but I just don’t believe that.
I found this movie equally strained. Danny Aiello seems more-than-pleased with his pizza joint. He tells Mookie that he thinks of him as one of his sons. He says he wouldn’t dream of moving to another neighborhood; he’s seen neighborhood kids grow up on his pizza. So why, when a couple seconds (a couple of seconds) of yelling and confusion occur in the restaurant, does he immediately brush off the most inappropriate possible word? And why do all the customers who earlier flat-out refused to join the boycott, being the same people who’ve been eating there since they were children, immediately turn on him? Not to downplay the impact of this word, but everybody take a breath and think about what’s happening.
Maybe that’s Spike Lee’s point, I guess, that people don’t step back and think about it. Maybe I’m letting my Midwestern upbringing color things; these were Brooklyn-ites, tough and in-your-face. The fact that it’s the hottest day of the year is mentioned enough times to be important. The environment was portrayed as being sort of a pressure cooker of emotions. Perhaps they are more likely to pop than characters in some British film about repression in a country house. Maybe the mitigating factor is just that they’re in a Spike Lee movie where everything plays out just a bit BIGGER than usual.
I think the best Spike Lee movie, incidentally, is Inside Man; it works because there’s a whole heist and investigation element that Lee has to focus on, and then he can only utilize the racial tensions angle as a side dish, which he does, quite effectively. I hear his documentaries are also wonderful; they're both in my Netflix queue.
This is a documentary that came out, to much critical fanfare, in 1994. Want to know how much critical fanfare? There’s a section on the DVD called “Siskel and Ebert,” and I had to watch it—just for old times’ sake. What a good show that was when Siskel was still alive and Ebert was in good health. Anyway, the feature is a collection of clips which begins with Siskel and Ebert giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up review to the film, then both critics naming the movie as their number one pick for all of 1994 (over Pulp Fiction, Quiz Show, and the Oscar winner of that year, Forrest Gump). Finally, there’s a clip of Ebert, naming the movie his number one movie of the 1990s. That’s a pretty big deal; this involves remembering and loving it over the course of five years. Ebert is joined by Martin Scorsese (for Siskel was gone by the end of 1999), and Scorsese enthuses over the film, too.
So maybe I was oversold. Maybe I expected to be dazzled in a way that wasn’t realistic for a relatively low-budget documentary. Maybe it just wasn’t realistic at the end of an Epic Wednesday.
The film follows two African-American high school students from the slums of Chicago as they attempt to make their marks on the world by playing basketball. They both begin at a well-to-do school that takes on good basketball players on scholarship. One kid, William, is allowed to stay; another, Arthur, has problems and is forced to leave. The movie follows them for four years of high school and carries them through to college. We see them grow up, we see their families change shape, we see as their promise is or is not fulfilled.
It moves pretty slowly—it’s a three-hour film—but an interesting structure emerges about halfway through, as the boys experience an almost complete reversal of fortune. William, the one whose scholarship allowed him to stay at the better school, did great for a few years, and then lost an entire year to a knee injury, received a basketball scholarship to a university anyway, but could not get his standardized test scores high enough to attend it. Meanwhile, Arthur is pulled from the good school, his father (a drug addict) disappears and his mom is fired. She spends a few years on welfare, and Arthur struggles. And then his dad is back, clean and religious out of jail, his mom graduates from a nurses’ aide program, and his school goes to the state championships.
Some of the family stuff is very poignant. There’s a moment I remember with Arthur’s family, when his mother prepares the meal for his 18th birthday—there’s some awesome-looking fried chicken there, and a two-layer German chocolate cake. As she slathers frosting over the cake, she talks about how she’s proud of what he’s accomplished, what he does, etc., and then declares, without irony, that just reaching the age of 18 is an accomplishment, which, in her neighborhood, it clearly is.
But did it grab me? Would I say, like Roger Ebert did, that it’s “one of the best films I have ever seen”? Well, the overabundance of basketball in this movie caused me to glaze over a bit. The facts of the matter are thus: sporting events lend themselves beautifully to a film narrative. You have all the motivations you need (each team wants to win), you have all the intrigue and suspense that you need (which team is going to win?) and you have the climactic moment (and the blue team wins!) and all of those elements are built right in. But! If someone like myself has an ingrained disinterest in sports, then the impact of that narrative is lessened. This is, I think, why Hoop Dreams didn’t strike me as the life-changing cinematic experience other critics have described, but I would not let that discourage anybody who is interested.
Comments