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July 23, 2005
Hustle & Flow
Craig Brewer's Hustle & Flow (IMDB) tells the story of DJay (played by Crash's Terrence Howard, who will likely score a few acting awards), a small-time Memphis pimp and drug dealer who dreams of becoming a successful hip-hop artist. He's learned from a local bar (Isaac Hayes) owner that local hip-hop legend, Skinny Black (Ludacris), will be in town to hang with his old friends and that DJay's drug connections might come in handy. DJay sees this as his ticket to the top. Slide Skinny Black a demo tape after sharing some weed, and he'll have his ticket out of the ghetto. Add in the mandatory recording sessions, and you've got a Showgirls for crunk. A Rocky for the Dirty South. A. O. Scott sees in this use of genre conventions elements that are "both naïve and cynical," and that mixture might be what colors my own ambivalent response to ths film.
I still haven't decided whether or not I like Brewer's film, which won the Audience Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Amy Vincent's washed out cinematography gives Hustle & Flow's Memphis a shabby, run-down quality that beautifully captures the lost souls who inhabit the film. The film also complicates many of cliches of the "star is born" genre. It's no surprise, of course, that the hiphop star Skinny Black turns out to be a shallow party animal who has Forgotten His Roots, the hardscrabble Memphis streets that gave his music soul. But the film does make DJay a more complicated character. While he waxes poetic about our human awareness of our mortality in a potentially powerful opening scene with one of his prostitutes, Nola (Taryn Manning), he is occasionaly abusive towards the prostitutes who work for him and seems oblivious about the difficulty of their work.
The film also does little to contest the misogyny of some aspects of hiphop culture (Laura Sinagra of the Village Voice also notes the demeaning portraits of all of the film's female characters, including the shrill church-going wife of DJay's demo producer, though, to be fair Armond White offers an alternative, class-inflected reading of DJay's relationships with the women who work for him). DJay's first recording is "Whoop that Trick," with all of DJay's friends chanting the catchy hook. While some of DJay's friends gently push him for something more "radio-friendly," the humor of characters such as the white church musician, Shelby (DJ Qualls), singing the hook undermines any real critique. In addition, because these lyrics come from the heart, the pain of the south, as Shelby attests, they are "authentic" and presumably beyond critique.
But Hustle & Flow did hook me with some aspects of its rags to riches fantasy narrative. Terrence Howard's performance was riveting, and the film's implied criticsm of the power politics of the music industry was fairly effective, especially when Skinny Black shows complete disregard for his musical roots. This critique is also evident in the film's final shot, which features DJay walking directly towards the camera repeating his mantra, "Everyone's gotta have a dream." Even with these solid moments, unlike Roger Ebert (an intelligent pimp with a heart of gold--haven't seen that in a Hollywood film before), I don't think the film quite moved beyond the limitations of its genre.
Posted by chuck at July 23, 2005 11:36 PM
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Comments
I agree with you completely - I've been rather surprised at the hyperbolic praise lavished on this film, which tries to get the best of both its worlds (A Star Is Born meets gritty urban drama meets blaxpoitation) and resultingly sends a nonstop barrage of mixed messages. The scene that nearly made me hate it was the one in which Brewer attempts to give Taryn Manning's character some feelings (the microphone incident) - it's a token moment of character development, but it might have been admirable, if it hadn't been practically made fun of in subsequent scenes. Howard and Taraj P Henson's performance are amazing, though - too good for the film, I'd say.
Posted by: dvd at July 24, 2005 4:44 PM
I wanted to like that scene, but you're right that the film undermines that scene's critique of DJay's behavior. Arguably, the final scene can be read as emphasizing the exploitative aspects of the music industry, but given the film's "gritty realism," those scenes merely seemed shallow at best, misogynistic at worst.
Armond White attempts to make the case that the film gives DJay an unexpected complexity, but that's not enough to carry the film in my opinion. And I'd imagine that the film's mainstream popularity probably derives from a self-congratulatory reading that essentially takes Hustle's hip-hop Horatio Alger narrative at face value.
Henson (who's from here in PG County, Maryland) and Howard's performances are by far the strength of the film and probably give it a weight it doesn't deserve.
Posted by: Chuck at July 24, 2005 11:16 PM