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