GRIDLOCK'D
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Gramercy) Starring: Tim Roth, Tupac Shakur, Thandie Newton. Screenplay: Vondie Curtis Hall. Producers: Damian Jones, Paul Webster, Erica Higgins. Director: Vondie Curtis Hall. MPAA Rating: R (drug use, violence, profanity, nudity) Running Time: 91 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Call 911 for the Cliche Police if you must, but the eyes are the window to the soul. The finest actors working in films are those who can command the screen with a gaze: Paul Newman, Ralph Fiennes, Anthony Hopkins, Morgan Freeman. You look at these men on screen and you can tell without them saying a word that there is something going on in their minds, that the characters they play are real human beings. We will never have a chance to discover if Tupac Shakur could have been a great actor, but he had that unique quality in his eyes. In GRIDLOCK'd, an oddly effective combination of gritty drama and social satire, Shakur and his co-star Tim Roth take sketchy characters and make them exciting to watch through the pure energy of their talent and chemistry.
Shakur and Roth play Ezekiel "Spoon" Whitmore and Alexander "Stretch" Rome, two Detroit buddies who share a spoken word/jazz trio, an apartment and a drug addiction with Cookie (Thandie Newton). When a New Year's Eve party ends with Cookie comatose after a drug overdose, Spoon and Stretch begin to wonder if they are living on borrowed time. They soon make a New Year's resolution to get into rehab, but that proves to be easier said than done. As though the temptation to fix were not hindrance enough, Spoon and Stretch also find their attempts to get clean hitting a road block of bureaucracy, confusion and red tape. The government might be the least of their obstacles, however, as they find themselves suspects in the murder of a drug dealer, and on the run from a nasty thug (Vondie Curtis Hall).
In order for you to buy into GRIDLOCK'd at all, you have to accept it as a surreal odyssey rather than as urban realism; unless Spoon and Stretch sleep through an entire day at the hospital after bringing in Cookie, they are going to government offices on New Year's day, in which case they should be thankful they get any help at all. GRIDLOCK'd may actually be a response to the fatuous social commentary of another urban odyssey, 1991's FALLING DOWN, which found a besieged middle class white male venting his righteous anger against the system during a trek through inner city Los Angeles. In FALLING DOWN, Michael Douglas' D-FENS (the character's personalized license plate, echoed in GRIDLOCK'd by the drug lord D-REPER's plates) whips out a gun because he can't get breakfast at McDonald's; in GRIDLOCK'd, Spoon and Stretch are unarmed against the demands placed on them before they can get into a rehab center. And where the unhinged D-FENS became a heroic surrogate for audiences, writer/director Vondie Curtis Hall refuses to let Spoon and Stretch off the hook for their own part in the situation. One bureaucrat responds to a tirade from Stretch with the question, "Do you expect the world to stop...just because you picked _today_ to clean up?" The world in GRIDLOCK'd is just as frustrating as the world in FALLING DOWN, but the cathartic moments yield no easy answers this time.
Hall has some interesting things to say about what we expect from The System, but perhaps not enough of them. A significant chunk of GRIDLOCK'd is devoted to Spoon and Stretch's flight from D-REPER and from the police, and those sub-plots serve up some thoroughly predictable moments. In one scene, Stretch scares off D-REPER by getting chummy with a police officer; another presents that old chestnut of the two mistakenly-suspected heroes in a public place watching a television news report of the crime which shows their pictures. The entire sequence of events seems designed merely as an excuse to get Spoon and Stretch running, while the other primary plot has them standing in line or sitting down much of the time. Hall also plays with gratuitous inserts of drug paraphernalia and flashbacks to the day before the film's main events, perhaps making a particular effort to point out the talent the characters are wasting through self-destructive behavior.
Oh, the irony of it. Tupac Shakur made a career in music and movies playing the hard case, and living the life to back it up. In GRIDLOCK'd, Shakur gets the chance to play someone who has seen enough of the way his life could go to know that it scares him. Spoon is an idea for a character at best as written by Hall, but Shakur displays an intelligence and survival instinct which struggle with his addiction. Mostly it comes through those eyes, eyes with none of the hardness you might expect from the infamous gangsta. It is Spoon who plays conscience to Stretch's pure appetite, and Roth plays Stretch with a gleeful self-destructiveness (he reveals that he is HIV positive even as he is preparing to shoot up again) which is as much an obstacle to Spoon's goal as any agency or enemy. GRIDLOCK'd's most cruelly comic scene finds Stretch "helping" Spoon get into an emergency room by repeatedly stabbing him with a tiny pocket knife, and it becomes an appropriate symbol for how the company he keeps has slowly drained the life out of him. With friends like that, Spoon doesn't need enemies, and Shakur looks at Stretch with the tired eyes of a man who has seen too much. The tragedy now is that we won't get more chances to see those eyes again.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 drug traffic jams: 7.
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