How Hollywood reduces urban tragedy to cliché
British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor’s best film role was Ensign James Covey, translator for the Sierra Leone captives who were the subject of the 1851 Supreme Court case that ruled in favor of the rights of people to not be enslaved, in Spielberg’s great historical drama Amistad. Notwithstanding the portrayal of a tortured, beleaguered existential sufferer in 12 Years a Slave, Ejiofor brought inquisitive intelligence to the black masculine endeavor in Dirty Pretty Things, Redbelt, even Kinky Boots — performances that avoided racial clichés. Ejiofor is the anti–Samuel Jackson. So it’s surprising that he offers the cliché-ridden Rob Peace for his first American film as writer-director.
The title suggests more than a name. Its irony negates serenity, stability, harmony — the theft of freedom — to sum up the life of New Jersey youth Robert Peace (Jay Will), a black Yale student who was killed in a 2011 urban drug battle. The film’s source, a biography by Jeff Hobbs titled The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, has a built-in spoiler, whereas Ejiofor means to elicit familiarity and sympathy.
Yet Englishman Ejiofor doesn’t understand the complexities that led to Peace’s tragedy, or else he has succumbed to leftist Hollywood convention. The introductory voice-over – we hear Peace say, “That was the last day I was a child” — combines pessimism and cynicism of Hollywood victimhood. His adolescence is scored by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 hit “The Message.” (“It’s like a jungle sometimes / It makes me wonder / How I keep from going under.”)
That trailblazing song also prescribes the limits to popular understanding of black American experience.
Ejiofor casts hip-hop singer Mary J. Blige as Peace’s single mother, Jackie, who embodies the same care-worn, long-suffering stereotype she played in Mudbone. Ejiofor miscasts himself, misrepresenting Peace’s babydaddy conflict of pride and carelessness. The circumstances behind the father’s incarceration are as vague as the reasons for young Rob’s sudden acceptance to Yale. Surprises are always sprung on these unsuspecting victims, especially the posthumous narrator-protagonist, who is granted too much hindsight wisdom. Jay Will intones his desire to “control the chaos of life, change the microenvironment.”
Rob Peace resembles a black-ghetto version of Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy, the J. D. Vance biopic; the protagonist advances to the Ivy League, pursues intellectual ambition, and finds an ethnically different romantic partner. But its predictably dire outcome also recalls the miserabilist directorial debut of Denzel Washington, in Antwone Fisher. Instead of Washington’s homecoming finale (a Jonathan Demme inspiration), Rob Peace dispenses liberal nostrums.
At Yale, a white, feminist biochemistry professor (Mare Winningham) advises Peace, “Science is almost defined by paternalism and conservatism. That combination might make you a little more likely to think of an alternative solution to a problem. To think radically. Radical thinking changes the world.”
This is the communist sentimentality that the Democratic Party, Hollywood, and its partisan-solicitor actors believe in. It contradicts the spiritual influence teenage Rob received when his mother enrolled him at St. Benedict’s Catholic prep school. He adopts the motto “Whatever hurts my brother hurts me,” yet the film ignores the hip-hop cultural influence from the New Jersey ghetto to the New Haven campus that makes him a drug-dealing entrepreneur, headed for the boneyard.
In Martin Scorsese’s Bad music video, from 1987, Michael Jackson and novelist Richard Price concocted an extended dramatic narrative similar to Rob Peace’s, based on the real-life story of Edmund Perry, the 17-year-old black Phillips Exeter prep-school graduate who was killed in 1985. But Jackson’s rousing song — and his transformation from a quiet kid disguised in a pre–Trayvon Martin hoodie to a fantasy street tough — indelibly explored the nature-or-nurture issues of street behavior, turning it into a metaphor of the star’s own artistic ingenuity and outsider insecurity, paradoxes included. By comparison, Jay Will’s sincere performance in Rob Peace seems anomic.
Ejiofor’s film goes from Bad to Breaking Bad, neglecting the paradoxes that arise from photos of the actual Robert Peace during the end credits. Is reinforcing stereotypes the only storytelling possible? Rob Peace is bound by the patronization of black experience, apparently a worldwide virus.
