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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Sanaa Lathan and Taye Diggs shine in a hip-hop-fueled romantic comedy that displays the quiet strength of African-American film's new wave.
Oct 11, 2002 | The way the music we love as teenagers grows -- and doesn't grow -- with us is a potentially great subject for a movie. So it's frustrating that the subject only occasionally peeks out from the agreeable romantic drama "Brown Sugar."
In the movie's opening section some of the seminal hip-hop figures -- Slick Rick, Doug E. Fresh, Dana Dane, Big Daddy Kane and the members of De La Soul -- answer the question "When did you first fall in love with hip-hop?" The director, Rick Famuyiwa ("The Wood"), intercuts those interviews with scenes set in the early '80s of people gathering on Brooklyn playgrounds to watch break dancers and DJs and rappers perform. So before the movie has even started you're given a taste of the excitement and joy of being in a place where you're hearing something that sounds so completely right you can barely conceive of a time when it didn't exist.
But the excitement and sense of possibility opened to the people who heard hip-hop and embraced it is quickly subsumed in the story of Sidney (Sanaa Lathan) and Dre (Taye Diggs), who become best friends as children during the early days of rap. Twenty years later Sidney has left a job as a music critic at the Los Angeles Times to return to New York as the editor of the hip-hop magazine XXL. Dre has gotten a job as an A&R man at a mainstream hip-hop label. Their careers have meant to show us that their lives have taken a course dictated by their love of the music. The songs they loved and the shows they saw are the touchstones of their lives, and the names of those records and artists are their shorthand for memories of shared times, moods, emotions.
In Sidney's voice-overs -- excerpts from a book she is writing about her own love affair with music -- we quickly realize that she is also writing to Dre, pouring out the love she's never been able to express. In addition to the music laid end-to-end on the excellent soundtrack, a mix of classic hip-hop tracks from the likes of Eric B. and Rakim and new cuts, Mos Def and Queen Latifah show up in supporting roles.
"Brown Sugar"
Directed by Rick Famuyiwa
Starring Sanaa Lathan, Taye Diggs, Mos Def, Queen Latifah
Famuyiwa and his co-writer, Michael Elliot, have clearly conceived the movie, like the book Sidney is writing, as a love letter to hip-hop. So why does the music end up feeling so incidental? Why doesn't it seem any more important than any other buppie career path?
It's not because the focus of the movie is on the burgeoning love story between Sidney and Dre, how they come to admit they've always been in love with each other. That shouldn't be a problem in a story about two people who have always communicated through music. And it's not as if the movie doesn't address the way loving any art form ultimately breaks your heart. Dre quits his cushy job when he gets sick of the pap his record company is putting out, and Sidney gets caught in the tangles of balancing journalistic objectivity and her desire to be an advocate for the music.
The problem with "Brown Sugar" is subtler than that. It has to do with the movie's lack of texture, of specific detail. Sidney and Dre do an awful lot of talking about what this or that song meant to them. And though they occasionally touch on why hip-hop no longer sounds quite as vital to them as it did, the movie, perhaps afraid of alienating contemporary fans, quickly gets away from that topic.
What's missing from "Brown Sugar" is the very thing that "24 Hour Party People," Michael Winterbottom's recent film about the '80s rock scene in Manchester, England, has in abundance. In scene after scene in that movie the characters hear a song performed -- or perform a song themselves -- and watching them you realize that the ground has opened up beneath their feet, that their life is irrevocably changed from that moment on and that their fate will always be tied to this music.
Watching "Brown Sugar," on the other hand, I got the feeling that Sidney could go into publishing and Dre into some corporate position without changing the fabric of their lives all that much. They may love hip-hop, but the movie doesn't show us two people who have admitted it into the marrow of their lives to the point that they'd be devastated without it. That sense is what a movie about how music can utterly change someone has to contain.
And yet if "Brown Sugar" fails as a film about how art can transform -- or destroy -- your life, there is something in its smooth, pleasant conventionality that needs to be recognized. I don't want to call it anything as definite as a trend but there is something present in recent black American movies, something modest and ordinary and on some basic level satisfying, that white commercial movies have lost. We've all seen the stories the new black pictures are telling before. Essentially, they're happy-ending movies where true love triumphs and the small guys stand up to the bad guys. And it's that familiarity that keeps them from being truly exciting.
