Rob Peace
Now this is a true life story of “Rob Peace,” such movies aren’t made these days any more.
The title character, in the strong Jay Will style of a young Denzel Washington, was raised in East Orange New Jersey as a science enthusiast. Rob’s father was a drug dealer and his mother juggled three jobs to cater for him in a private school owned by the Benedictine monks. He ended up going to Yale to study biochemistry and could have become one of the great inventors of our time, only to be held captive by the sad premise of his life. His father, Skeet, had no such use: he went to jail for killing two women with a pistol. The prosecution of Skeet had its own strange features which made the police efforts look unfounded (the gun that was put as evidence was not the one Skeet owned looking for a case in point here) and even if Rob was beset with thoughts to the contrary regarding his father being guilty, he was to make wishful efforts to bring him back, even if to such an extreme that some it would seem they warped him scientific brain into growing ‘designer weed’ which was sold to raise legal battle funds.
“Rob Peace” is a product of the Black New Wave film movement of the 1980s and the 1990s, which dealt with the struggles of poor and working class people in some modestly budgeted films. It can also be said that this movie owes its existence to the actor Chiwetel Ejiofor. In addition to directing the movie and writing the script based on a book by Jeff Hobbs, who was acquainted with the titular character, he portrayed the character in the film. He is big, boisterous Skeet who cares for his son, but is a bit troubled and has issues that render him incapable or fractured in many ways.
Did Skeet do two murders? He says he did not, and a lot of people in the area are convinced too that he did not and he had not any criminal record before he was arrested for the murders. And here’s Rob’s beloved mother Jackie Peace (Mary J. Blige, who is as much as an actress as she is a musical performer) will not go that far that she is starting to develop any doubts, it is just that she saved some of the more nasty aspects of Skeet’s life from their son, in order that he could have, like so many other sons do, the character of his father instead of the many masks these women wear. The narrative that flows from the relationship between Rob and his father who is in jail is central to the film.
However, this is not the only element that Ejiofor seems to focus on. There is so much, and I can’t stress this enough, that is put forward in this adaptation, both to the positive and to the negative. It is striking to think of the screenplay and directing elements as being part of a craft. It is at once also a form of reductionism (the effort to get into a scene and out as soon as one has said their bit) and also a form of thickening (the ambition to use each scene to ennoble the epic by establishing or developing characters, embedding foreshadowing, commenting on the world beyond this one tale).
Of many things that it is, “Rob Peace” is also a portrait of a certain category of remarkable individual whose extraordinary talents are harnessed to the service of those who are not so fortunate. The father of Rob is the archetypal instance. Note how he shifts from being emotionally overwhelmed by his son’s helping hand to becoming a user who acts as if he deserves such services and forcing his son in withdrawal to the degree that he is wailing for the expected services of his son rather than giving. However, Rob is also what is familiar or believable to people from all walks of life, such as the neighbors, educators, and fellow students he attended high school and university with (he has this unique attribute of attracting people from diverse backgrounds to come together and have fun). There is even a part where Rob and a few of his mates whose ventures include buying and reselling houses for profit, also wake up to the reality that there is money in the trade which took place after the gentrification commenced within and outside East Orange and Newark. He has foresight, yes, but he has also got expertise. It will soon be seen that the experiences were handy in giving him the foresight.
You can see this idea even represented in the small instances such as when Jackie and Rob are having a discussion on budget and all she does is ask him what is the figure.
“In the beginning, there was a man,” that is the subtitle of ‘Rob Peace’, an ambitious if ultimately quite stuffed film which seeks to condense a very eventful life and its many and larger ramifications in a span of two hours; in fact, it could have easily run for three or been converted into a TV mini-series. In some respects, important elements seem to have been cut short or even omitted. But that is the kind of project in question when it comes to maybe just another rueful inevitability. (Old movie biographies used to be able to get away with focusing on the highlights of a life they’d give you 20 minutes on a character’s childhood, then glimpses of three or four distinct parts of their existence, then wrap things up and roll the credits, and somehow nobody in the audience felt cheated.)
“Rob Peace” is also something of a stylistic anomaly in this regard: it is a populist work that is intended for consumption by a large audience. It is unfortunate that such films do not have a wide theatrical release anymore (unless it happens to feature Will Smith and even that is a hit or miss) for it looks like it was aimed for the audience’s reception. There is room for laughter, tear jerking moments, hand-to-mouth moments, and banter thanks to the vision of Ejiofor on screen and the editing skill of Masahiro Hirakubo.
There are instances in which, firstly, Rob is able to be a knocked out by a challenge rather than being knocked out by the current situation, struggle to support himself, win the wire infection or even the actual fluorescent bulb which we already know is doing him such harm even though to him it does not seem so at the moment, and you bet you would be able to feel that body tussle with a pack of dramatic tissues in a full house.
The highlight of this movie however, is that it does not risk itself by trying to direct you to whoever you must empathize with, and then implying that if you feel otherwise should be a characterization wrong movie if such a character were to feel about something. If anything, ‘Rob Peace’ is actually trying to minimize the potential criticism where it is said that this is the kind of movie where you come out feeling as if you have witnessed a single narrative when, in fact, one can possibly identify with two or three because it is not a portrayal of one person’s existence.
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