Anyway - at first, I wasn’t really down with the movie the title is attached to either. In fact, through the opening half hour I was getting ready to give it to stern a lecture about how I’m all for genre movies exploring socio-political issues, but how it tends to work better when they naturally arise from the genre elements. Whereas, this seems to have approached things the other way around, presenting a well-intentioned but dispiritingly one-dimensional take on systemic racism, drugs, police brutality and social inequality (all of which are bad, dontcha know), with a featherweight take on the Frankenstein mythos overlaid on top.
Meanwhile, any narrative tension seemed liable to be nullified by the presence of a central character - Vicaria, played by Laya DeLeon Hayes - who appeared to be destined to spend the film being smarter than everyone else, right about everything all the time, and generally morally unimpeachable / intellectually undefeatable.
In particular, I just didn’t buy Vicaria’s whole “death is a curable disease” shtick as a message which is in any way positive or helpful for those dealing with grief - which is a problem, given that it’s the single rhetorical device upon which most of Bomani J. Story’s script rests. And, similarly, I found the decision to open the film with a succession of close up, slo mo familial deaths to be not so much harrowing (as was presumably intended), but simply emotionally manipulative, establishing a tone of grim self-seriousness which proves hard to shake through the opening act.
Thankfully though, I also felt that the film becomes a lot more interesting as it goes along, really kicking into gear during the second half, and winning me over in the process.
Though Story clearly has no interest whatsoever in delivering the all-black-cast version of ‘Reanimator’ or ‘Monster on Campus’ I suppose I was vaguely hoping for, he does give us a surprisingly faithful reinterpretation of ‘Frankenstein’, as taken straight from the novel, concentrating in particular upon the rarely filmed trope of the creator abandoning and losing track of his/her monster immediately after creating it, only to become engaged with its plight once it returns to threaten his/her loved ones.
Towering in the darkness, its face hidden by dangling, blood-caked dreads and a voluminous hoodie, Vicaria’s ‘monster’ (a reconstituted version of her brother Chris, who was slain in a gang shooting during the opening) proves a pretty menacing and memorable creation, capable of dishing out some reassuringly gruesome ultra-violence at various points in the film. (Although, the attempt to humanise him through the use of a generic, distorted ‘monster voice’ falls rather flat, it must be said.)
Once the monster is on the scene though, the film as a whole becomes more intense, more chaotic and more convincing across the board, questioning our heroine’s motives and means in appropriately Frankensteinian fashion, and incorporating enough moral ambiguity and emotional turbulence to more than justify its existence.
An improv-heavy set of performances from the supporting cast very much helps in this regard, as characters who initially seemed pretty one-note are allowed to come into their own and acquire some depth, lending a sense of authenticity to the avowedly realist setting, and achieving some genuinely powerful moments here and there.
A particular shout out in this regard must go out to Chad L. Coleman, playing Vicaria’s father, who, to not put too fine a point on it, is fucking brilliant. As a broken man struggling to keep it together in the face of grief and substance abuse, he has pathos to burn, and in the (sadly too few) scenes when he’s on screen, the movie really takes flight in dramatic terms.
In fact, it is Coleman who carries the weight of the movie’s most cathartic moment, when he stands his ground and refuses to unlock his surrogate family’s front door for the police who are outside carrying out a door-to-door search.
Amidst all the wide-ranging political point-making and generalised rage at the state of contemporary America crammed into Story’s script, it is this tangential detail, conveyed through Coleman’s all-too-convincing fear and determination, which perhaps made the deepest impression on me, prompting me to reflect on the sobering reality of the fact that, although the family in this case have nothing to hide from the law, black people in the USA (and by extension, members of similarly marginalised communities across the globe) have nothing to gain from allowing armed cops access to their living space, but a hell of a lot to lose.
Elsewhere, Denzel Whitaker is also very good as the housing project’s resident drug dealer, blurring our sympathies as he’s revealed to be just another frightened, overgrown kid once the threat from the monster takes hold, and delivering some of the film’s very few genuine laughs in the process. Child actor Amani Summer meanwhile does great work too, in one of the more interesting portrayals of the obligatory “little girl who befriends the monster” character I can recall seeing in Frankensteinian cinema.
Whilst avoiding spoilers, I’ll conclude simply by noting that the ending of ‘The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster’ is… significantly different from that of a standard Frankenstein narrative, let’s put it that way. By the time we get there though, it feels as if the film (and the characters) have earned it.
No comments:
Post a Comment