The best non-feel good movie of the year.
Angie Thomas’ debut Young Adult novel about the injustice of police negligence and the perceptions of race relations from the perspective of 16 year old Starr Carter after viewing her childhood friend gunned down over an avoidable misunderstanding with authorities has had a meteoric rise in popularity, going from new release less than 2 years ago to hotly contested school reading list material in danger of becoming banned by certain school districts seemingly overnight.
Now, on the heels of its uniquely successful launch, it has
received a high profile film adaptation and if its source material is even half
as hard hitting and emotionally raw as what I sat through in that theater, it’s
easy to see why “The Hate U Give” is worth all of its hype.
Similar to Aneesh Chaganty’s “Searching” from earlier this
year, one of the movie’s most effective assets is its own timeliness, being a
story that couldn’t be told better or with more impact than at any other moment
in time preceding its release. Coming on the heels of high profile screw ups of
the justice system and law enforcement in the internet age, the film opens a
dialogue about the power of perception and the hypocrisies of narratives woven
by the institutions that sell out those they swear to protect in the name of
watching their own backs but also breaks down cultural barriers that
desperately need to be opened up.
In an age where diversity is a hot button issue every time
people of color are granted the center stage, “The Hate U Give” could have easily
been a preachy and pedantic slog about the victimization of “good” black folk
that match the image of “presentable” to a T, almost to a point of perpetuating
naiveté. What it instead does is humanize.
Black people are presented as having a sense of unity and
culture but are all nevertheless distinct human beings; some are victims,
others are criminals, many more simply go about their day but take agency in
the running of the world around them but they all feel like real breathing
people with their own agendas and priorities, a testament to the solidly
atmospheric direction of George Tillman Jr. who gets performances out of his
cast of veterans and burgeoning talent that are frankly astonishing.
Amandla Stenberg gives the breakout performance of her
already impressive young career, nailing the sense of a PTSD-stricken teenager
forced to step up and become a voice of influence to seek justice for her
departed friend in a manner nobody so young should have to, while embodying the
capacity for good that the Young Adult genre can be, presenting a clarity to
grey and complex issues that feel downright sobering as a reminder to how needlessly
problematic the real world can get.
When confronting her police officer uncle, played stupendously
by Common, about the double standards that let her friend’s killer ostensibly
walk away with a paid vacation and no consequences, she bluntly asks him, a black
man, whether or not he’d have done the same in that White cop’s shoes, as well
as whether or not he’d have done so if he pulled over a white man in the
suburbs driving an SUV. His cold but simple and honest response is as angering
as it can be disappointing when you realize how much you may have sympathized
with his viewpoint yourself at some given point of your life.
There are no slouches to be found in the cast, from a
surprisingly subdued performance by KJ Apa as Starr’s boyfriend having to
learn to support her despite his inability to directly empathize with her
circumstances, to Russell Hornsby and Regina Hall as her parents, pushing her
to navigate a society that she has to thrive in despite discrimination she may
face, and even to Anthony Mackie as a local gang leader, the closest the film
comes to some sort of human antagonist, who manages to remain surprisingly human
to punctuate the best scenes of the movie despite doing some of the most
heinous actions within it.
Throughout the highs of its story’s emotional turmoil
however, “The Hate U Give” is not about engendering distaste for those that stereotype
and jump to conclusions but rather a film that wishes to celebrate venturing
beyond preconceptions of the past and present to make a better future,
encapsulated by the film’s title derived from Tupac’s concept of hate starting in
childhood and growing uglier with time.
Constraints of the YA literary style and its clear influence
within the screenplay do hold the film back a tad from doing heftier deep dives
into the sociological phenomena of its subject matter, which occasionally leads
to frustrating tropes that dragged me out of immersion and back into the fact
that I was watching a film, and does lead to an ending that feels a bit rushed
despite the impressively brisk pacing of its runtime of over 2 hours.
8 Challenged Perceptions out of 10
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