Film review

John Singleton (1991)

When he was Oscar-nominated for this film in 1992, John Singleton, at twenty-three, was the youngest-ever nominee in the Best Director category.  (He was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay.)  It’s a record he still holds but Singleton hasn’t progressed to the level of successful career that Boyz n the Hood, his first feature, seemed to predict.  Easy to say with hindsight but I’m not surprised.  The picture (which I’d not seen before) is a remarkable piece of work for someone so young but it doesn’t have the qualities – flair, originality, lack of discipline – you naturally associate with a richly promising novice.  In spite of the subject and setting and the edgy title, the film-making is precocious largely in terms of Singleton’s competence in telling a story that is narratively and dramatically conventional, sometimes clichéd.  Boyz n the Hood is thoroughly entertaining and often gripping but it doesn’t strike you as the work of a raw talent of limitless potential.

A legend at the start announces that ‘One out of every 21 black males born in America will be murdered.  Most will be shot by another black male’.  Giving this information at the outset is (like the quote at the beginning of The Hurt Locker) a dramatic miscalculation:   it makes it obvious that Singleton’s main aim is to illustrate the statistic and what follows isn’t strong enough to make the ultimate direction of the story powerfully inevitable rather than predictable.  Boyz n the Hood is set in South Central Los Angeles (the ‘Hood’ of the title means ‘neighbourhood’).  The first half hour or so describes the life of three black boys in the area in 1984.  Singleton then cuts to ‘seven years later’, where he resumes his focus on the protagonists, Tre and the brothers Ricky and Darin (‘Doughboy’).  Tre is now a high-school senior, preparing to go to college. Ricky, who attends the same school, is a talented American footballer, trying for a sports scholarship to the University of Southern California; he’s also already a father.  Doughboy, older than the other two, has been in prison and is now into crack-dealing.   Doughboy – with his friends Monster, Dookie and the wheelchair-bound Chris (I wasn’t sure if he lost the use of his legs through being shot:  Chris can walk in the 1984 part of the story) – is involved in the local gangs and guns world.  Showing how criminal culture intersects with law-abiding life in the area is one of the things that Singleton does best.   We get a sense of it at family and social gatherings and the normal soundtrack of the place includes the noise of helicopters as well as police sirens.

Although the meaning of the words would have been very different, this picture could well have been called Do the Right Thing if Spike Lee hadn’t got there first.  Tre’s parents are separated.  At the start of the film, he’s living with his mother, Reva, but then moves to the home of his father, Furious.  At school, Tre is a bright but disruptive student; he’s signed a ‘contract’ with Reva which says that, if he doesn’t improve his behaviour, he’ll go to live with Furious instead.  When Reva first mentioned this agreement, I didn’t expect it to be regarded as binding on an eleven-year-old but, as far as Reva is concerned, it is – and the same seems to go for Furious too.  He has, and imparts to Tre, very clear ideas about the way black males should live their lives.  Furious was only seventeen when he fathered Tre and advises him to take precautions against doing the same.  He keeps a gun in the house – and it comes in handy the very first night Tre spends under his father’s roof – but Furious is careful to instruct Tre against violence, and getting involved in violence.  The role and duties of fathers is a major theme of Boyz n the Hood and its development is not only unsubtle but sexist.  The father(s) of Doughboy and Ricky is/are conspicuous by their absence.  Their mother Brenda is emotionally unstable and irresponsible – she adores Ricky and does nothing but yell abuse at Doughboy (even when he’s an obese young boy).

Ricky, in becoming a teenage father, does exactly what Tre avoids doing, thanks to his father’s advice.  (I wasn’t clear why Tre took Furious’s words so deeply to heart that he delayed losing his virginity in preference to using a condom.)  Although he criticises the cruder expressions of misogyny in the culture he’s describing, Singleton appears to suggest that it’s only a father who can properly instil moral sense and backbone in a son and he underwrites the mothers’ parts to make the point more clearly (unless the underwriting is itself an unconscious expression of sexism).  Reva, who, at the start of the film, is completing her master’s degree, never seems to be lacking in self-esteem.  If she’d been presented as wanting an excuse to get Tre off her hands – for selfish reasons – it might have been more convincing.  As it is, Reva doesn’t seem to have a mind of her own – she simply has to abide by John Singleton’s opinion that a moral education is for a father to deliver.  (We don’t see Tre in school again once he moves in with Furious.)

A man from USC visits the Baker home to discuss a sports scholarship for Ricky.  Later that evening, Brenda holds her son in her arms and tells him how proud she is of him, that she always knew that he (unlike Doughboy) would amount to something.  We in the audience have an equally strong conviction at this point that Ricky won’t live to see USC and that he’ll be a victim of gun violence.  He still needs a SAT score of 700 to get to college.  In a later scene, when, as he and Tre walk away from the house, Brenda calls to say that an envelope has arrived containing Ricky’s results and he takes no notice (he’s thinking of joining the US Army by now), you can be pretty sure that’s the last time his mother will see him alive.  After Ricky has died of his gunshot wounds, we see Brenda looking at the SAT printout and we can guess the score (710).  It’s agonising melodramatic details like these that reveal Boyz n the Hood, in spite of its distinctive subject, as kin to hundreds of earlier films – even though Ricky’s death, especially when his bleeding body is brought back home by Doughboy and Tre, is a gruellingly compelling sequence.  There’s a good twist when Furious has persuaded Tre to hand over his gun and – we think – against going to seek revenge on the gang who murdered Ricky.  Tre lets himself out of a window and drives off with Doughboy and co to hunt the killers down.   But when Tre thinks again during the drive into town and gets out of the car, the moment feels fake:  Tre seems not to have realised the wisdom of what his father has told him but to have remembered the moral of John Singleton’s story.

The words ‘Increase the peace’ appear on the screen at the end of Boyz n the Hood.  Singleton’s imperative registers almost as a refutation of the Public Enemy/Spike Lee instruction ‘Fight the power’.   Yet Singleton, when he’s making racially-political points, makes them just as baldly as Lee at his most tendentious.  The sequence in which Furious explains the social evil of ‘gentrification’ is clumsily contrived (as well as Tre and Ricky, a small crowd of locals assembles to hear him).  The scenes involving a good cop-bad cop duo – the white policeman decent, the African-American policeman abusively anti-black – are forceful but obvious.   Singleton grew up in South Central LA and there seems no doubt that Boyz is essentially autobiographical; how specifically it describes people in his own youth is less clear.   The last two scenes in the 1984 section – an amusing, unsettling facts-of-life conversation between Tre and Furious on a beach, quickly followed by shots of Tre watching Doughboy and Chris being taken away in a police car (for shoplifting) as he and his father return home – have the elusive but incisive texture of memory, of something hard to grasp but which is lodged in the mind for a lifetime.  When Tre first arrives at his father’s house, Furious gets him to rake the leaves from the patch of front lawn and this sequence is resonant in a similar way (and for the audience throughout the film:  it comes to mind each time you see a shot of the lawn).  As Doughboy walks away from Tre at the end, a legend appears:  ‘The next day Doughboy buried his brother’.  Doughboy vanishes from the frame and another legend explains that ‘Two weeks later he was murdered’.  Then we read that Tre went to college and his fiancée Brandi to a neighbouring one.  Of course this doesn’t prove that the characters are all based on real people but you naturally associate the what-happened-next epilogue with films dealing with real lives.

It’s fascinating to see this cast in retrospect, given what they went on to do, although the acting is pretty variable.  As the teenage Tre, Cuba Gooding Jr is already very aware of the camera.  There are moments when he almost appears to be looking for it – as if to say ‘Have you got this?’ to the cinematographer (Charles Mills).  (Gooding also looks several years out of high school:  he was in fact twenty-three when the film was released.)  He’s strong when Tre is in extremis.  Elsewhere, he lacks the quiet, watchful wit of the younger Tre (Desi Arnez Hines II).  Gooding’s most affecting moment is when Tre breaks down after being threatened at gunpoint by the racially abusive black cop (Jesse Ferguson) and embarrasses himself at crying in front of Brandi (Nia Long).  For the most part, there’s not much continuity of soul between the younger and older versions of the kids.  It took me a little while to work out who’d grown up into whom (Ricky is played by Donovan McCrary, then by Morris Chestnut.)  It’s true that Baha Jackson and Ice Cube, as Doughboy, have a weight advantage in this respect but I think they match up and impose themselves because their performances are simply more deeply felt and penetrating than those of the other young actors:  Ice Cube never loses the gabby vulnerability of his pre-adolescent self.  They may be overcompensating for the thinness of their roles as Singleton has written them but, as the two mothers, Angela Bassett (Reva) and Tyra Ferrell (Brenda) are both too actressy and self-aware.  Their studied histrionics slow their scenes down.

Singleton is very fortunate to have Laurence Fishburne in the role of Furious – ironically well named because Fishburne gains such authority from his quietness here, as well as from his physical presence.  His shoulders are more than broad enough to bear the thematic load placed on the character.  The crudely conceived ‘gentrification’ scene apart, Singleton develops the character of Furious gradually and effectively.  When Tre first arrives at his father’s home, it’s hard to tell from Furious’s appearance whether he’s got a job at all.  Fishburne is so convincing that, when it turns out halfway through that Furious seems to have his own financial service business, it comes as a surprise but it’s a credible one.   When Tre leaves Doughboy and the others to avenge Ricky’s death and returns to his father’s house, Furious looks at him then turns his back and closes a door behind him.  In this moment Fishburne expresses wonderfully how Furious’s relief is quickly overtaken not only by anger with his son but with a feeling of humiliation that his paternal authority wasn’t enough to keep Tre at home at the first time of asking.  Fishburne was thirty at the time the film was made but, as we know from Apocalypse Now (he was fourteen when Coppola began shooting in 1976, having lied about how old he was in order to get the role), he’s an exceptionally protean actor in this respect.  Looking just the right age as Furious in both 1984 and 1991 is no problem to him.   I kept wondering as I watched him here if Fishburne might have been an even better Malcolm X than Denzel Washington.  They share the ability to illuminate thoughtful men but a quality of dangerous, mysterious reserve doesn’t come naturally to Washington in the way that it does to Laurence Fishburne.

29 September 2009