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Hustle & Flow August 14, 2005 |
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By society’s standards, this man is a criminal. He deals drugs, peddles flesh, objectifies women, wastes time, gets drunk, gets stoned, philosophizes cynically, and lives a boring life of semi-existence in the Memphis ghetto. By the standards set by the law, and by the general code of what is acceptable in middle class America, as pertaining to lower class America, than yes, the hero of this movie, D Jay, as he goes by, is on the lower rung of the criminal enterprise known as malaise and mid life crisis. He is a dope dealer and a pimp as well, but something offsets that in Craig Brewer’s powerful and sympathetic “Hustle & Flow”, and it comes in the form of redemption, of waking up one day and realizing that at 40, living the life of a small time pimp and hustler is hard, and somewhat unfulfilling, and if you’re going to make it in this world, you have to get your voice heard, or give it your best trying. D Jay’s story is set in the unfavorable background of scrimping and hustling in Georgia’s underbelly, and it’s an ugly area, but in the music, the crunching beats and impossibly catchy hooks of an underground swell of free form rapping known as “crunk”, and in the larger redemptory notion that even a blip on the American societal map that is D Jay, a loafer and a pimp, can reach for that elusive pie in the sky, “Hustle & Flow” is made of the finest quality of beauty, soul, and soulful beauty. Never has a hip-hop movie been this mesmerizing, and never has the American Dream sounded this good. D Jay is played by Terrence Howard with much tenderness and ferocity, a middle aged man with nothing to show for his life except a ramshackle house, a slightly pimped out Cadillac (without AC), a stable of three hookers (only one of which is productive), a ratty cliental of potheads, and a shattered psychology of Where’s, as in, “where has it gone?” and Time’s, as in, lost and hopefully regained. His life, though pointless, is not without its poetry, as we see immediately as the film opens, in a tight close-up on D Jay, going on in a carefully worded monologue about Man as entity, as living, breathing being, and dog, as such, as his servant, but without the weight of the world hampering his existence. The point of the scene, in plot terms, is the pimp’s motivation to his number one earner, Nola (Taryn Manning), that her cooperation and, shall it be put, professionalism in his enterprise is crucial, but on a larger, more philosophical scale (everything in this film could be blown up to microcosms of various ideologies), it’s just a depressed man grappling with the meaning of life. If said meaning can be found in hustling dirt weed and pimping unhappy lost girls to local lowlifes for $40, than D Jay hasn’t found it, but the film’s motto, plastered on the posters, and echoed a few times in D Jay’s numerous monologues, “Everybody Gotta Have a Dream”, seems to suggest that it isn’t far off, and when our hero has an epiphany (maybe it happens in the car as Nola is out on business, or maybe it happens at church, in a remarkably poignant moment listening to a gospel singer’s take on Al Green’s “Jesus is Waiting”), only his own insecurities and rash judgments can bring him down. It’s like watching a cat chasing birds, if he’s quick enough, he’s richly rewarded, but when the impossibility of flight is too much of a frustration, his lackadaisical demeanor is his ultimate downfall. D Jay’s epiphany is that he has a gift for flowing rhyming words out at a steady and controlled pace, and that the pressures and difficulties of his life makes for good, hardcore street poetry, which set to thumping beats, and smoothed through an expensive microphone, could produce some infectious rap music. The only problem is his lack of knowledge in producing music, which is where the film’s secondary players come in; Anthony Anderson as a kindly married depositions recorder with the knowledge of laying track on tape, and DJ Qualls as a skinny white boy with the knowledge of mixing sounds, beats, and hooks to appropriately effective levels. Also involved is Taraji P. Henson as Shug, D Jay’s very pregnant retired street girl who has a lovely moment singing the back up chorus on one of the demo tapes, a moment that means the world to a girl who has nothing. In the face of heavy burdens, and the nearly impossible task of getting underground street music heard, the relationships in the film, while often littered with bickering and strain, are generally heartfelt and strong, especially in the way D Jay takes care of Shug, and constantly motivates an increasingly skeptical Nola. All of these characters have their problems, personally, professionally, or domestically, but somehow, even though he’s the one with the mid life crisis messing with his brain, D Jay holds them all together, like a big old dysfunctional poppa bear, with a gift for words, and a yearning to spit them out, with a little help from his friends. Director Craig Brewer injects his complex and sometimes gritty tale of redemption with local Memphis flavor and dedicates his masterpiece to Sam Phillips, the do-it-yourself genius behind Sun Records, and all of those great early Elvis recordings. Like the intensity of those early Sun sessions, “Hustle & Flow’s” music slowly evolves from free form word association, to amateur lay downs, to smoothly produced “crunk” gems, and Howard and Henson’s singing sounds surprisingly professional when filtered through studio technology. Brewer’s framing of D Jay often mirrors the state of mind he’s in at the time, as a two-shot downbeat pose next to a lava lamp, or a hazy drunken extreme close-up conversation with legendary Memphis rapper Skinny Black (played by Ludacris, who shared screen time with Howard in “Crash” earlier this year) would suggest. Terrence Howard’s performance as D Jay, a character who is virtually in every scene, is nothing short of miraculous, creating a sympathetic, deeply complex and ultimately likable creature out of the molds of poor ghetto life clay. Like Jamie Foxx’s Oscar-winning performance in “Ray”, or to a lesser extent, Eminem in “8 Mile”, Howard is capable of raising the “dreams of glory” music biz stereotypes to the heights of poetry, and it’s a work of art. It’s the best performance of the year so far, putting the pressure on 50 Cent, whose fall film, “Get Rich or Die Tryin'” is similarly themed, and highly anticipated. It’ll have to be pretty special, because in terms of shear emotional resonance, musical greatness, and power of performance within a tale of dreams and redemption, “Hustle & Flow” is solid gold. “Hustle & Flow” is playing in Orchard Park at the Quaker Crossing Cinema. by Adam Suraf
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