Hustle and Flow

Hustle & Flow is difficult to categorize because it seems so different from many other films. With its focus on the Memphis ghettoes and a man trying to break out of the life his circumstances, and his own inclinations, have forced him to, it is like such films as Rocky and Working Girl and many others—though in its details it is decidedly unlike these films. In its story about the struggle to write and record a song (which becomes a metaphor for transformative change) it is like any number of serious and silly films about celebrity and the quest for fame—here the focus is more on transformation and escape—we see little of what happens after the song is recorded, and a great deal of what happens as the characters work to write and record the song and find a way to bring it to public attention. As I struggled to make connections with this film, I was reminded of any number of analogues, some of them far removed—the old Andy Hardy films of the 30s and 40s often included a subplot about putting on a show and earning money for whatever reason. That Thing You Do, about a one-hit wonder group, is another connection.

But I found it most satisfying to view Hustle & Flow on its own grounds, as the story of the main character Djay’s life as a pimp and his struggle for self-expression. All of the primary characters in this film are distinctive, and above everything else, including the music, they make this film memorable. Foremost among them is Terrence Howard as Djay. He is the film’s center and heart, and he brings the main character to life and gives this film much of its energy. The film begins as he is monologuing to one of his prostitutes about the meaning of mankind and his lot in life. I was immediately reminded of the monologues in Terrence Malick’s films as well as the intense apocalyptic monologues of Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction, though Djay’s monologues seem always intended as a means of exploring and presenting his sense of his own situation.

Although Djay apparently has a number of whores working for him, his favorite, the one he refers to as his partner (meaning his business partner), is Nola (Taryn Manning) a truly skanky blonde white girl whom he apparently picked up at a truck stop. She grows and develops throughout the film—she catches the enthusiasm of his desire to record a song and wants to be a part of it all. She hates being hot and longs for air conditioning. At the end of the film she has become his obsessive promoter, using her own skills to ensure that Djay’s song gets the airplay she believes it deserves. Djay’s love interest is Shug (Taraji P. Henson). She comes across as extremely pregnant and frightened, in general, but perhaps frightened of Djay in particular. Whether she is pregnant with his child is unclear. He pays her little attention early in the film and begins to appreciate her only as she helps contribute to the recording session by providing background vocals for the song. As she realizes her own potential as a singer, she comes to life. She is a powerful and poignant presence. Also effective is Key (Anthony Anderson), who produces and helps write Djay’s song. Key like Djay finds himself living a life he didn’t plan for, and Djay’s desire to rap becomes his own opportunity for escape. D. J. Qualls is a white drug salesman and sound engineer who brings humor to the film.

The film doesn’t glorify or romanticize pimps and whores and their lives. But it does not spend time condemning them either. It helps us understand them and what they experience. It is difficult to watch the film and come away with any sense that it approves of the lives it portrays. There is clear sympathy, empathy. It does strongly suggest that many of the people who live these lives have no alternatives. In Djay and Nola there is a strong longing for another kind of life. Djay’s mid-life crisis is not different from that of many men in their 30s and 40s. His sense of entrapment and failure, his desire to justify himself and to do something that matters, gives the film a universalizing interest. So too does the gradual transformation he undergoes, from a selfish and self-absorbed man who often mistreats the women who work for him, to a man who appreciates generosity and kindness and learns to embody these qualities himself. Such a transformation may seem trite, but in the context of the film and especially of Djay’s character it is convincing. Also convincing is the way he bungles (a major bungle) his meeting with a popular rap artist whom he hopes will help find an audience for his song.

Having never visited Memphis, the home of the blues and of Sam Philips (to whom the film is dedicated) and of course of the King Elvis, I cannot assess the film’s accuracy. But the speech of the characters seems distinctive and convincing, and the settings, with dilapidated low-rent row houses that may be in bad shape but that people do live in and care about, seem real. And although the film give quiet homage to the musical heritage of Memphis, that heritage is present in the film more by implication than by outright fact. When Djay and friends record their first song, they have to build their own recording studio and beg radio disk jockeys and others to give it airplay. The establishment music industry of Memphis is nowhere to be seen.

The Skeleton Key

Few films exploit setting so fully and foolishly as The Skeleton Key (2005). Set in New Orleans and surrounding areas, it would have you believe that the rural South, especially Louisiana, is infused with superstition, magic, voodoo, hoodoo, decay, decadence, sweat, endless rain, gators, and Zydeco. It assaults its viewers with images of broken down shacks, blind people who speak ominous if incoherent portents, ghosts, photographs of ghoulish children, desiccated and unidentifiable animal corpses, lynchings, a magic store in a Laundromat. There are the menacing chickens, one of which turns up for dinner. And of course there is Kate Hudson in an impressive array of skimpy clothes. The South in this film is a place of hidden evil, superstition, danger, decay, madness, and the unexplainable. It is always dark, and always raining. Gothic horror up the wazoo.

“She won’t understand the house,” moans Violet Devereaux (Gena Rowlands), the matriarch of the old plantation house to which Caroline Ellis (Hudson) goes to take a job nursing a dying old man. The meaning of this ominous pronouncement is really a red herring, but it grips our attention for a while. Ellis is from Hoboken, New Jersey, and, yes, like Shreve McCannon, she doesn’t understand the South, at least not the South of this film. Nor would anyone else, probably. Caroline is an adventurous soul. There isn’t a single locked door or darkened passageway or ominous attic into which she doesn’t venture. The old adage of where there’s smoke there’s fire apparently never dawns on Ellis. The most ridiculous moment comes when she is in the darkened attic and there is a small locked room which her key (the “skeleton key”) won’t open. Moreover, something seems to be IN that room, rattling the locks and banging on the door to get out. Is it the mad woman in the attic? Is it Frankenstein’s monster? Is it Jimmy Hoffa? Like every good horror movie heroine, unarmed and dimly lit, Caroline Ellis enthusiastically attacks the door, trying to let out whatever is banging around in there. In a later scene she succeeds in getting into the room.

The centerpiece of the film is the 30-room Devereaux mansion. Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner knew how to use old Southern mansions, and their influence is faintly evident here. At least I wanted to think so. This old Gothic Southern mansion holds a hidden secret, it’s in that room in the attic, and you know it’s going to find its way out. It’s all tied up with magic and human depravity and evil and the history of the place. Part of the secret harkens back to a party at the turn of the century that ended in a lynching. The lynching is supposed to remind you that this story takes place in the South where every black tie dinner ends in a ritualistic murder of servants. By this point in the film, things are rapidly falling apart—not so much the events in the film as the film itself.

The first 45 minutes or so of this film were bad but tolerable. At least you had some interest in how the plot was going to play itself out, how all the ominous premonitions and foreboding hints and foreshadowings would congeal in whatever horrific consummation the film would offer. But in the last half the momentum builds and you know where the film is going, you know exactly where it is going, even if you don’t have the details.

The Skeleton Key would have you believe that every African American in Louisiana is somehow involved in dark magic. One black character, Caroline’s friend Jill, says she does not believe in hoodoo, but she is clearly afraid of it. Superstition and the occult are part of the ambience associated with the Louisiana setting of the film. Yet there is a kind of racism here that broadly indicts virtually every person of color in the film.

I was reminded of The Vanishing, a 1988 French and Belgian film directed by George Sluizer, in which events come to a conclusion remotely similar to the one in The Skeleton Key. Both films build a thick and moody atmosphere of ominous dread, but The Vanishing has an intelligent script, is well made, and offers an interesting psychological understory. I was also reminded of a 1987 film directed by Alan Parker, Angel Heart, also set partially near New Orleans and concerned with voodoo and the occult. It too builds to an ending with a dark if predictable twist.

The Skeleton Key will raise the hairs on your arm. It may also make you yawn. And if you’re from Hoboken, you may think you’ve learned something.

No Time for Sergeants

Thursday, June 1, was Andy Griffith’s 80^th birthday. I decided to commemorate this day by watching the 1958 film No Time for Sergeants. I first watched this film when I was about 10 years old. At the time I thought Griffith’s hillbilly act was hilarious and was especially amused by the latrine scene where Griffith, as Private Stockdale, causes the toilet seats to “salute” the inspecting colonel.

This film was based on the novel No Time for Sergeants by Georgia writer Mac Hyman. The novel was adopted for Broadway, where Griffith played the part he later recreated for the film.

Mervyn Leroy, a director of note in the 1930s and 40s, directed this film. He was in his final years as a director. This film shows none of the skill Leroy brought to bear on such earlier films as I was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Mister Roberts.

Griffith made his film debut in the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd (directed by Elia Kazan), a fascinating film about power, ambition, and the media. Griffith played “Larry ‘Lonesome’ Roads,” a bucolic Southern n’eer-do-well whose good looks and singing talent win him a place as a radio disk jockey and ultimately as a political candidate with national aspirations. Griffith’s performance as a deceptive, ambitious, ruthless individual is nuanced and complex. Ultimately, it becomes too over-wrought, but this first film shows that Griffith had real talent and promise.

In No Time for Sergeants he squanders that talent in a way that may have typecast him and cost him the opportunity to play more varied roles. As Will Stockdale he plays a good-hearted, naïve, uneducated hillbilly who is loyal to his friends and who dislikes bullies. When he is drafted, he goes willingly (even though his father has hidden the draft notices) because he believes serving his country is the right thing to do. He is a combination of Jethro Bodine from The Beverley Hillbillies, L’il Abner from the comic strip, and Huck Finn. He plays a simple but good-hearted bucolic Southerner, uncorrupted, a role that we have seen in any number of films about the South—especially some of the early Elvis films.

The script is poorly written and poorly paced—on a level with the Sergeant Bilko television series. No Time for Sergeants is one of a number of films made in the first two decades after World War II that address a viewing audience of former American GIs still interested in seeing films about the military. Told from the viewpoint of enlisted men, it shows the officers as distant, apathetic, and obsessed with maintaining rank and power.

(Curiously, the barracks where Stockdale and his fellow enlistees stay are integrated—there are several black enlistees living there with the white enlistees—but they are always in the background, always almost out of view. This may be a faint if half-hearted acknowledgement of the civil rights movement then underway).

Stockdale remains uncorrupted throughout this film, wholly unaffected and unenlightened by the experiences he goes through, which include parachuting out of a burning plane into a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb test. Everything in this film is played for laughs, but the humor is weak and strained, at least from 2006 standards. In A Face in the Crowd Griffith’s acting was over the top. Here he just seems to be occupying the role.

In The Andy Griffith Show Griffith played Sheriff Andy Taylor in the quaint and mild North Carolina town of Mayberry. Andy Taylor is considerably more domesticated than Will Stockdale. In Andy Taylor we see another kind of good-hearted, good-natured Southerner--a role that in one form or another Griffith played for most of the rest of his career.