BOYZ N THE HOOD
[SPOILERS]
A film review by John Locke
Copyright 1992 John Locke
I'm baffled by the acclaim shoveled upon BOYZ N THE HOOD. It wasn't even film school quality. It's more like a B+ in Sociology 1. Each scene makes its blunt, bludgeoning point about life in the ghetto (we know it's a ghetto because there are artfully placed heaps of garbage here and there).
Many of these points are the utterances of the characters. There are a number of "characters," but most of them are the same person, the director, John Singleton, who uses his characters as mouthpieces for his own ideas. When young Tre points to the map of Africa and says that's where the first man came from, it's Singleton talking. When the football recruiter makes a speech on the improbability of making the NFL, it's Singleton talking. In one of history's worst lines of dialogue, Tre's father asks Tre how the SAT went, then casually notes, "of course those tests are culturally biased, except for the math parts." Yep, it's Singleton talking. We don't get to actually hear one of the "culturally biased" questions. We're supposed to take Singleton's word for it, I suppose. (Didn't Singleton see STAND AND DELIVER? "Those people" pass "those tests" when they study for them. Oops, I forgot--"those tests" were all math parts.) When that line is dropped with a dull thud, I realized that the whole minor thread about taking the test was a set-up for that one lousy line. The piece de resistance of pontification occurs under a billboard in a vacant lot. Tre's father's lecture on gentrification attracts a variety of neighborhood regulars, from dope dealers to the perpetually unemployed. But their discussion sounds like a MacNeil/Lehrer roundtable on urban issues. Where's the m*th*rf*ck*n' verisimilitude?
This last is representative of the pervasive illogic of the film. There's a barbecue, the host says the food is ready, and 50 people stand up in unison, like so many robots, and crowd the table. There's no guile to the direction. You can picture Singleton instructing the ensemble: "on 'ready,' rush the table." At times, the amateurishness is laughable, like when young Tre is delivered to his father to undergo "manhood training." Dad is so glad to see him he immediately puts him to work raking up a thick deposit of Autumn leaves from the front yard. But here's the kicker: there are no trees in front of the house! Where did all those mysterious leaves come from? Not only that, the raking appears to take Tre hours (can't learn manhood in twenty minutes). Someone glued those damn leaves to the lawn. Add to that the sociological illogic: Tre learns manhood by performing the work his putative post-manhood father neglects.
The whole film ends up with a staged, faked feel. I never felt I was watching real characters acting spontaneously. We get a football player who never plays football, or even talks about it; we get drug dealers who never deal drugs. BOYZ N THE HOOD is like an updated version of those right-way-and-wrong-way-to-ask-a-girl-for-a-date films they occasionally showed us in high school. Now they show us films illustrating sexual harassment in the workplace. Snore...non-actors making obvious points. Somehow these films always end up unintentionally funny, and so does BOYZ N THE HOOD. In the heart-assaulting finish, the football player is victim to a drive-by and his homeboys take his blood-drenched corpse home and dump it on the sofa. I know I'm supposed to be sad during this scene but instead I'm yelling, "so that's why they"--er, "they"--"cover the upholstery with plastic."
BOYZ N THE HOOD is well-intentioned, like the behavior training films, but that doesn't redeem it as film art. The first obligation of a director is to tell a story; intellectual statements can only flow from the story as an indirect effect. I couldn't mourn the murder of the football player because he'd never been given human dimensions. The power of film as a salve for our prejudices is that it can show the common human links between people of different cultures. BOYZ N THE HOOD fails on this very basic level by not developing its characters and making them or their world realistic. The characters rarely breath as real people because they're too busy demonstrating the director's sociological agenda. I didn't see any special insight into the characters or their situations by the director. Nothing rang true because there was no originality to offset the predictableness. Ironically, this film could just as easily have been made by a white director or anyone else as unacquainted with the ghetto as John Singleton.
John
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