Film review

  • The Hate U Give

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Tillman Jr (2018)

    The title of the film and of its source material, a 2017 young adult novel by Angie Thomas, derives from the 1990s rapper Tupac Shakur’s concept of THUG LIFE:  The Hate U Give Little Children Fucks Everybody.   A more specific inspiration for the novel were the killing of Oscar Grant in Oakland, California – dramatised in Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station (2013) – and other recent headline-making deaths of young African Americas, at the hands of the police or in police custody.  Angie Thomas has said that a main aim of her book was to draw public attention to the Black Lives Matter movement and the related issue of aggressive American police racism.  George Tillman Jr’s adaptation, with a screenplay by Audrey Wells (who died the day before the film’s release), certainly succeeds in doing this.  The Hate U Give also paints a vivid picture of the community in which the story is set.

    The sixteen-year-old heroine Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg) and her family live in the predominantly black, urban district of Garden Heights.  It’s a fictional location – the essential setting is presumably ‘a typical American city of today’.  Although Garden Heights is a poor neighbourhood, Starr’s father Maverick (‘Mav’) (Russell Hornsby) owns a local store and her mother Lisa (Regina Hall) is a nurse at a local clinic.  Within the community, Starr, her older half-brother Seven (Lamar Johnson) and her younger brother Sekani (T J Wright) are most unusual in attending a private school – Williamson Prep – most of whose pupils are white and from well-off families.  The pivotal event in the plot is the shooting dead of Khalil (Algee Smith), Starr’s friend since childhood, by a white police officer (Drew Starkey).  The ensuing drama centres on the opposing forces working on Starr, the sole witness to the crime, to speak up or remain silent.  April Ofrah (Issa Rae), an activist lawyer, urges her to testify to a grand jury.  The King Lords, a gang of drug dealers who control the neighbourhood and for whom Khalil worked, apply menacing pressure on Starr and her family to keep quiet.

    In an introductory voiceover, Starr describes her dual identity – ‘Garden Heights Starr and Williamson Starr’.  (The Hate U Give describes her route to a single integrated identity.)  One aspect of the home life vs school life dichotomy works particularly well.  Although Khalil’s death attracts national media coverage, the identity of the young witness to the shooting is protected:  it makes sense that the other Williamson kids, including Starr’s white boyfriend Chris (KJ Apa), aren’t aware of her involvement whereas this is common knowledge in Garden Heights.  Less convincing is that the tensions inherent in the Carters’ exceptional schooling arrangements are ignored until it’s dramatically convenient.  Starr goes to the Williamson prom with Chris, who brings her home afterwards.   Starr’s mother already knows about Chris but her father is not only alarmed but astonished to meet him.  Didn’t Mav worry this might happen if he sent his daughter to a nearly all-white school?

    The characterisation of Starr’s fellow students at Williamson is hit-and-miss too.  Her two main girl friends are Hailey (Sabrina Carpenter) and Maya (Megan Lawless).  Early in the story, Hailey makes a remark that’s arguably racist but which Hailey insists to Starr is a harmless joke.  When Khalil’s death becomes a big news story, Hailey’s eager to take part in a demonstration organised by other Williamson kids urging justice for Khalil; after the grand jury fails to indict the officer who killed him, she takes a very different attitude.  The fickleness is believable enough (taking part in the demo means skipping a school test) but Hailey becomes too distinctively offensive:  she comes over as a nasty individual rather than as typical of a cultural system that has shaped her attitudes.  Chris, on the other hand, emerges as a surprisingly successful and well-balanced character.   When he tells Starr ‘I don’t see colour’, you feel he’s bound to be exposed as a shallow fraud.  He also shows few signs of being ready to sacrifice the privileges he’s accustomed too.  Yet he’s not only genuinely fond of Starr but practically helpful to her in the climax to the story.  At the end of it all, they’re still together.

    Mav Carter is a key figure in The Hate U Give.   The start of the film sees him educating younger versions of Starr and Seven (Kai Ture and Hassan Welch respectively) in the best ways to stay alive in a police encounter.  He also gets the children to learn by rote the Black Panther ‘Ten-Point Program’, which Mav terms an alternative Bill of Rights.  Until he served a prison term and decided to change his ways, he himself was a King Lord.  He was already married to Lisa when he fathered Seven, whose mother Brenda (Andrene Ward-Hammond) is a hopeless drug addict.  Russell Hornsby’s considered playing lacks nuance.  He makes Mav a bit noble – he doesn’t suggest a man with a chequered past or trying to subdue the legacy of one.  The cast is mostly strong, though.  From the start, Amandla Stenberg’s Starr combines a cheerful face with a probing intelligence.  Regina Hall is excellent as her mother.

    The set-up is worked out very clearly in terms of double identities.  Starr has her Garden Heights and Williamson personas.  Mav, the responsible family man, was once a gang member.  Starr’s Uncle Carlos (Common), who was like a father to her while Mav was in jail, is a police officer.  The gang leader King (Anthony Mackie) is the biological father of Seven’s half-sister (Dominique Fishback).  Although the cumulative effect of these combinations is almost too neat, they’re plausible and, in most cases, effective in generating tension.  The pride in family, which resonates through the film with a confidence unimaginable in a contemporary story about a white American family, feels authentic.   George Tillman Jr stages the shooting of Khalil well.  When the police officer stops Khalil’s car, his passenger Starr, mindful of Mav’s advice, anxiously instructs Khalil on what to do and not to do.  Khalil obeys with a reluctance that perhaps explains why he chooses to take out a hairbrush that the cop fatally mistakes for a gun.    The final showdown between the Carters and the police is designed – indeed contrived – to evoke the shooting of Khalil.  Starr’s younger brother Sekani, in what is both desperate defence of his father and a demonstration of THUGLIFE, gets hold of and brandishes a loaded gun.  Regina Hall’s strong expression of Lisa Carter’s anguish (and relief when the police don’t shoot) rescue the scene.  Starr’s voiceover, though judiciously used throughout, reflects how much The Hate U Give is concerned to deliver an explicit political message.  But, although occasionally clumsy and melodramatic, this is a good film, as well as an emotionally compelling one.

    2 November 2018

  • Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Gus Van Sant (2018)

    Danny Elfman has written the music for all but one of Gus Van Sant’s films since Milk (2008) but, in the first part of his latest, the director and the composer are at odds with each other.  Van Sant, who also wrote the screenplay for Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, looks to be trying to subvert conventions of the disability biopic.  He’s hardly the first to do this:  My Left Foot (1989) went a long way to breaking the mould; The Sessions (2012) is a more recent honourable exception to the usual approach.  But let that pass … Elfman’s twinkling, mildly hopeful score is under the impression this is a standard-issue triumph-over-adversity story and keeps nudging Van Sant in that direction.  He eventually succumbs but the capitulation is no great loss.  Even when it meant to be more distinctive, the film was weak.

    The title is taken from one of the best-known cartoons of the protagonist John Callahan.  The drawing shows a posse of cowboys in the desert.  They’re contemplating an empty wheelchair; the reassuring words of one of the posse are the cartoon’s caption.  A wheelchair is central to the life story of Callahan (1951-2010) who, at the age of twenty-one, was in a car accident that left him quadriplegic.  At the time, he was a slacker, devoting most of his time to drinking in Long Beach, Southern California.  The accident occurred following a bar crawl he’d been on with another man, who was driving Callahan’s car.  After becoming paralysed, his alcohol problems got worse; after extensive rehabilitation, Callahan regained some use of his upper body.  Holding a pen between his hands, he discovered a talent for cartoons.  The visual style was rudimentary and the verbal humour black.  The effect was regularly sacrilegious in relation to religion, politically incorrect in relation to sex and disability.  Callahan, who’d now made his home in Portland, Oregon, also spent plenty of time at Alcoholics Anonymous:  at the age of twenty-seven, he gave up drink.  His reliably controversial drawings appeared in a wide variety of publications and, for the rest of his life, in each issue of the Willamette Week, Portland’s alternative newspaper.

    Van Sant inserts examples of Callahan’s work into the film.  They supply most of its amusing moments and serve as some kind of tribute to its subject.  Hard work, though, to find other things to recommend Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot.  Splintering the material into a non-chronological sequence of events is – as often with this technique – really just a means of fancying up a narrative the filmmaker fears will look weak if merely linear.  In this case, the result is still underpowered.  A succession of AA group sessions, for example, are barely dramatised.  Van Sant also uses occasional references to items in the Twelve Steps programme.  At first, this seems an attempt to firm up the listless narrative.  By the closing stages, the movie comes over as primarily an endorsement of AA therapy – which is fair enough but sits oddly with the lethargic anarchy of the first half.  As Danny Elfman has insisted, John Callahan’s biography turns into something more familiar.  The scenes illustrating his unresolved, screwed-up feelings about the biological mother who gave him up for adoption, although they’re laced with wry humour, still amount to a standard psychological explanation.  There’s even a moment when the hero has a vision of his mother, in which she assures him, ‘You’re a good person, John’.

    The film’s inertia is aligned with, and reinforced by, Joaquin Phoenix’s presence in the lead role.  His appearance – thanks in no small part to a ginger wig that’s unmistakably a ginger wig – is weird and confusing.  He evidently lost weight for the flashbacks to John Callahan’s hedonistic, able-bodied youth but is heavier in all the other scenes.  Phoenix is actually forty-four now.  The upshot of all this is that you get the impression (a) that Callahan was much older than twenty-one when he had his life-changing accident and (b) that the period of his rehabilitation was well in advance of six years.  The actor’s weary tone and speech rhythms sap his character’s anger (and have a soporific effect on the viewer).  For the most part, Phoenix is dynamic only when Callahan’s wheelchair is careering out of control.  As the AIDS-afflicted leader of the AA group, Jonah Hill gives a more alert and expressive performance.

    Rooney Mara blooms in the role of a physical therapy nurse both angelic and carnal – Phoenix livens up a little in their scenes together.  This is the second time in recent months these two have paired up, after Jesus and the title character in Mary Magdalene!  Which reminds me:  one of the interesting things about watching Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot at the Institute of Contemporary Arts was being made to realise that the film, although set in the recent past, is definitely a period piece.  John Callahan’s work may have scandalised in the last decades of the last century; some of his one-liners are even more outrageous now.   Two of the cartoons that Gus Van Sant includes illustrate this nicely.  One shows Christ on the cross with a caption ‘TGIF’; the other, two nervous-looking men on a construction site that bears the sign ‘Warning:  this area patrolled by lesbians’.  The crucifixion joke was received with much laughter at the ICA.  The construction site joke met with stony silence.  It’s true the ‘TGIF’ gag is the better one but that’s not enough to explain the different reactions.

    1 November 2018

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