JASON'S LYRIC
Drive-By Filmmaking
A film review by N'Gai Croal
Copyright 1994 N'Gai Croal/Terrordome Bookworks
George McHenry isn't depraved enough to show a son giving his father uncut heroin to shoot up, but that's about all that separates his directorial debut JASON'S LYRIC from being as twisted as this year's earlier entry in the inner city black pathology sweepstakes, SUGAR HILL. Still, he gives it the old college try, with scenes of patricide, torture, spousal abuse, car-jacking and good old walk-by shooting--if you're a bourgeois black filmmaker, it's the perfect backdrop for an old-fashioned love story.
Like many other young black male filmmakers, McHenry's aspirations are blood simple: he wants to be a genre filmmaker. But unlike their white counterparts, most brothas don't have the courage of their convictions (Carl Franklin's ONE FALSE MOVE is a rare exception). As if sex and violence weren't enough, they feel the need to further commercialize their films by setting them in the 'hood. Hence, the all-star rap soundtracks, the use of rappers in key roles, and the bullshit veneer of social consciousness.
The final result is often a hodge-podge that starts nowhere and spins its wheels in place for two hours, while delivering a set of stereotypes--absent/dead fathers, crack hoes, gun-toting gangstas and drug dealers--that could serve as a Klan recruitment tape. Meanwhile, white filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Roald Dahl and the Coen brothers run celluloid rings around directors like John Singleton, Matty Rich and the Hughes brothers. Unfettered by ghetto "reality" and too independent to know what the word "sellout" means, their hard-boiled visions soar while ours remain embarrassingly earthbound.
Like SUGAR HILL, JASON'S LYRIC is another lazy retelling of the Cain and Abel myth. Jason (Allen Payne) is the intelligent, upright older brother who works at a television repair shop, never sasses his moms and wakes up every night dripping in sweat, induced by nightmares about his father's murder. Joshua (Bokeem Woodbine) is that crazy muthafucka from around the way--a gangsta that couldn't hold a job if his life depended on it, sets his mother's nerves on edge and wards off nightmares with a cold forty or a bottle of gin, no juice.
Both live in Houston's Fifth Ward, which, as a result of McHenry's efforts, might just have a twelve-gauge shot at replacing South-Central L.A. as the mythical killing field of urban lore. As the genre demands, Jason is determined to be his brother's keeper. But then he meets a fine sista (is there any other kind in these movies?) named Lyric (get it? Jason's Lyric) and starts dreaming of a world outside of the ghetto (surprise, surprise). At the same time, recent parolee Joshua finds himself being pulled further in the local ghetto games by Lyric's half-brother Alonzo (Treach of Naughty by Nature fame). Before we can say "Shakespearean tragedy," a bank job is botched and the walls of Lyric's house are being painted the color of Elsinore: blood-red.
You might think that producing NEW JACK CITY, which McHenry did, would have gotten the need to make a 'hood film out of his system. But a man that would make two "House Party" sequels and once planned a sequel to NEW JACK CITY is not a man to be noted for his originality. JASON'S LYRIC lives up to that limited vision, encasing its actors in all too-familiar roles.
Forrest Whitaker, whose work in films as good as THE CRYING GAME and as bad as BLOWN AWAY has generally been inventive phones in a performance so shockingly bad that we want to avert our eyes. The good-father-that-goes-away-to-Vietnam-and-comes-back-in-shambles is old hat by now, a lazy form of shorthand designed to evoke pity. A better director might have encouraged Whitaker to play Maddog against type, to suggest an willfully unchecked self-loathing akin to Laurence Fishburne's coke-addled Ike Turner in WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?" Instead, McHenry pushes him into an undisciplined, boozy incoherence that overshoots sentimentality and lands squarely on embarrassment. By the time one of his sons puts a bullet in him, it feels like we've been put out of our misery.
The film's leads don't fare much better. Allen Payne has been likened by some to a younger Denzel Washington, but that would suggest that he can act, which no one should accuse him of. His tough-loving big brother act is only marginally more convincing than similar performances by Cuba Gooding Jr. or Morris Chesnut, but it's just as boring. The scenes where he tries to woo Lyric have a sweet corniness to them, which suggests that a respectable love story could have been told had McHenry not been so preoccupied with Houston's mean streets.
Bokeem Woodbine is no better--he doesn't have the you-don't-like-how-I'm-livin'-well-fuck-you swagger of Ice Cube's Doughboy from BOYZ N THE HOOD or the craziest-nigga-alive bravado of Larenz Tate's O-Dog of MENACE II SOCIETY fame. Fortunately, he doesn't need it. Joshua is a gangsta with a heart of cotton candy; he doesn't have the heart for a life of crime, but it's the only way he knows how express his anger. The film awkwardly drives this home in its only honestly powerful scene: when Joshua's mother throws away the surprise dinner he cooked for her because it was bought with his drug money, he runs out of the house and commits a violent car-jacking. A scene like this, coupled with Woodbine's rarely seen, beautiful smile suggests depths that the screenplay doesn't have--it concludes that Joshua is bad because he's just like his father.
Ironically, the best of the three leads, Jada Pinkett, fares the worst, because she's a prep-school brotha's wet-dream and an intelligent knockout who spreads her legs on date number three--and nothing more. After a couple sex scenes that look like outtakes from a bad Spike Lee film, Lyric has nothing to do but cling to her man, try to get him out of the 'hood and take a bullet at point-blank range. It's this insistence on simplistic pathology on the part of numerous black filmmakers that makes so many black people call for a moratorium on "negative images" when what's called for is complexity. And if black actors are in bad shape when looking for complex characters to play, black actresses are in critical condition. But McHenry don't love them hoes anymore than he loves us in the audience. Otherwise he would have made a different film.
-- n'gai croal croaln@washpost.com
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