BOYZ N THE HOOD (Has redeeming facet) Directed and written by John Singleton With Cuba Gooding Jr., Ice Cube, Morris Chestnut, Larry Fishburne, Angela Bassett, Nia Long, and Tyra Ferrell.
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Some reviewers have been treating this wave of black pictures as some sort of Golden Age. In terms of the actors, life-styles, slang, and neighborhoods hitting the screen, they may have a point. It’s also true that a sense of urgency in getting a message out gives some of these pictures a vitality and authenticity that they wouldn’t otherwise have; even a movie as technically feeble as Straight Out of Brooklyn has some claim on our attention for this reason. But compared to the best black-directed American features of the 70s and 80s, the half dozen of the new batch that I’ve seen so far strike me as both less revelatory and less durable. Bill Gunn’s Ganja and Hess (1970), Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977), Larry Clark’s Passing Through (1977), Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding (1983), and Billy Woodbury’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1984) are all examples of movies that not only benefit from their glimpses into black culture but also transform our very perceptions of it. Sadly, few if any of these movies were ever shown in the neighborhood theaters that are now playing Jungle Fever and Boyz N the Hood, and none of them, as far as I know, have turned up on network or cable TV or on video. (The scripts of Ganja and Hess and Killer of Sheep, however, have recently been published by Indiana University Press, in a volume with four other scripts called Screenplays of the African American Experience, edited by Phyllis Rauch Klotman.)
The currency and immediacy of these recent films is probably their strongest calling card, although it might be argued that these qualities tend to rule out the sort of conceptual originality that makes the earlier work so powerful. Two exceptions to this general rule may be Ruby L. Oliver’s Love Your Mama (1989), which dared to be upbeat without ducking hard questions (and which, perhaps significantly, has still failed to find a distributor), and Jungle Fever, which I like less now than when I reviewed it last month, but which still strikes me as having a complexity and diversity of address overall that is greater than the sum of its (mainly) hidebound characters.
In fairness to Singleton, the female characters in this movie are not completely voiceless. Some of them even complain about the boys’ misogyny, and one of the strongest scenes in the film–which admittedly provoked the second biggest round of applause at the preview I attended–consists of Riva telling Furious, “Sit your ass down–it’s my time to talk.” She goes on to say, “What you did [in raising Tre] is no different from what mothers have been doing from the beginning of time.” The only problem with this sensible remark is that it hardly tallies with what the rest of the film, including Riva herself, has been saying. Apparently what mothers have been doing from the beginning of time hasn’t included teaching their sons “how to be men.”
