Black films matter

As America continues the long struggle to confront its original sin of racism, even more foundational than the practice of slavery, films about the black experience become more central than ever.  I’ve transferred over a few recent reviews, and will continue commenting on African-American films under this rubric.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (MC-83, AMZ) is a home movie, in many senses of the phrase.  In fact, a house may be the main character, a Victorian Painted Lady with a view of the Golden Gate.  It obsesses a young man who grew up in the house before his family lost it, having been told it was built by his grandfather (in 1946, when blacks moved into a neighborhood vacated by Japanese internment, only to be supplanted themselves by gentrification).  It’s also a homie movie, created by two childhood friends, Jimmie Fails who supplied the story and plays the lead, and Joe Talbot, who scripted and directed.  Jimmie’s friend within the film is played by Jonathan Majors, and their rapport is very convincing.  But there is nothing amateurish about this home movie, displaying remarkable polish and sureness of vision for a debut effort, unafraid to be weird and whimsical, and going to unexpected places in a familiar place.

I caught up with a slightly earlier take on gentrification in the Bay area from a black perspective, and found it even better.  Blindspotting (MC-77, HBO) is visually and verbally inventive, also a distinguished debut by director Carlos Lopez Estrada.  Written by and starring two longtime friends from Oakland, Daveed Diggs (who won a Tony for Hamilton) and Rafael Casal, the film follows them as they hang out and work together, for a trucking company mostly moving black residents out to make way for white techies.  The Diggs character is coming off a short prison term for assault and a year’s probation, and wants to keep on the right side of the law, but his blacker-than-thou white friend Casal is a loose cannon destined to blow up in both their faces, with much more severe consequences for the black man.  Much of the dialogue is rapped, both literally and figuratively, with some surreal sequences and others that are painfully real.  It’s both funny and harrowing, and all-too-relevant to the issues of the day.

A different sort of partnership gives verve and authenticity to Premature (MC-81, Hulu).  Director Rashaad Ernesto Green co-wrote the film with lead actress Zora Howard, seemingly based on her teenaged self, a slam poetry prodigy before going off to Yale and an MFA.  Not sure whether he was the prototype for the slightly older man with whom she falls in love during the summer between high school and college, but sympathy is distributed between the pair.  A vivid sense of locale in upper Manhattan, and the raucous and genuine friendship among four teenage girls as one of them faces divergent life choices, eventually subside into a somewhat more formulaic storyline about troubled young love.  The result is appealing, but unsurprising.

If you liked Moonlight, I’m here to say that We the Animals (MC-82, NFX) is very much in the same vein, but if you ask me, considerably better.  I was more engaged with this swoony swirl of boyhood memory and desire, fell under its spell more fully, found myself more in tune with its directorial choices.  Jeremiah Zagar’s debut feature, adapted from Justin Torres’ debut novel, is the story of three brothers aged 10-12 trying to navigate the turbulent waters of their parents’ thrashing relationship, while making their own transitions to manhood.  The Puerto Rican man and white woman met in Brooklyn but moved to rural upstate, where their boys run pretty wild, and they struggle emotionally and economically.  The story is filtered through the consciousness of the youngest boy, who crawls under their common bed each night with a flashlight to write and draw about their lives.  Some of the drawings morph into animation, and the film’s lyrical and elliptical style, both in visuals and narration, is also reminiscent of Terrence Malick, another plus in my book.

If festival awards or over-the-top reviews lead you to consider watching Burning Cane (MC-77, NFX), let me offer the caveat that, despite a number of worthy elements, this film by 19-year old Phillip M. Youmans is extremely dark (literally and thematically) and darn-near incomprehensible.  Wendell Pierce is the best reason to watch, as an alcoholic Baptist preacher in backwater Louisiana.  But he is tangential to the difficult-to-parse family story, presumably autobiographical, of a mother, grown son, and grandson.  All the characters are at-risk, shall we say, in multiple ways.  The camerawork oscillates between the arty and the off-kilter.  The narrative and scene-setting is difficult to follow, though it does have a sense of grim authenticity.  After the fact reviews explained some aspects of the film that may well have been there, but were lost on me in watching.  The connective tissue simply wasn’t there, with too many questions unresolved, though a case can be made for the distinctive vision of the young filmmaker.  It’s possible to discern what the film is about, without ever figuring out what actually happened.  For example, who dies at the end, if anyone?

Alfre Woodard is not dissimilar in appearance to Kerry Washington, and yet I am always happy to watch Alfre, while Kerry makes me want to look away.  Could the difference be acting ability?  Or is it soul?  Her latest film is Clemency (MC-77, Hulu), a sort of black reprise of Dead Man Walking, though rather than a crusading nun, Woodard plays the warden overseeing the executions, two of which are excruciatingly depicted.  Wendell Pierce is the husband trying to reach her as she begins to fall apart under the stress.  As a death row inmate, Aldis Hodge is the focal point, in Chinonye Chukwu’s grimly realistic debut feature.

In near succession, I also watched Alfre in Down in the Delta (1998, MC-73, CC), directed by Maya Angelou, about a rough-living Chicago woman who redeems herself and her children by going back to the bosom of family in Mississippi and embracing their legacy.  It’s all a bit Hallmark-ish, but there are scenes of undeniable power, and good performances all round.