Nobody in the film LUV, from first-time
feature-length director Sheldon Candis and written by Candis and Justin Wilson,
has life easy. Not the rich kingpins or the drug thugs, or the families trying
to stay out of trouble, or the young children just beginning to become aware of
the hardships plaguing their native Baltimore. Everyone is struggling; everyone
wants a better life. Whether they deserve it, who gets to decide if they get
it, and why some end up wealthier or happier or more fulfilled than others—all
that stuff is up chance.
Unless, of course, you make your own
chances. And so Candis, a Baltimore native, and Wilson (who have worked
together since 2004) craft a story in which one man’s decisions reverberate all
around him. He dares to dream, but dreams don’t survive in a city as tough and
unyielding as Baltimore. They just can’t.
Eleven-year-old Woody Watson (Michael
Rainey Jr.) is the kind of kid who postures with a water gun in the mirror of
his bedroom, making boasts to invisible opponents like, “I’m the man. I’mma
kill you. You wanna die, right? I saw it in your eyes, you was scared,” but
goes to private school and is still too shy to talk to girls. He lives with his
grandmother because his mother is in rehab in North Carolina, but he doesn’t
really understand the reason for her absence. He just knows she’s gone, and
that his letters to her are all returned unopened. He tells his grandmother, “If
she saw me, she’d want to come back,” but it’s a wish, a fantasy. And by
definition, fantasies don’t come true.
In his mother’s place, however, is her
brother and his uncle Vincent (Common), recently released from prison after eight years.
Vincent, in his snazzy suits and with his firm demeanor, is trying to shed his
old life behind, the days when he dealt drugs, fought competition, and was an
all-around bus. He just wants to own a restaurant now. Play some music. Eat some
crabs. The street, he thinks, can finally be a thing of the past.
But you can’t forget something when you’re
surrounded by it, walking through it every day, and when it’s not so willing to
let you go. When Vincent decides to let Woody skip school one day so they can drive
around together in the uncle’s Benz and he can teach the boy “real world shit …
what it takes to be a man,” things start off well—Woody shows Vincent the illustrations
and comics he’s been drawing, and Vincent gets him a similarly fly suit, with a
pocket square and everything. Vincent and his mini-sized double, striding across
a Baltimore suit, walking against the wind, Woody in Vincent’s shadow—it’s a
legitimately beautiful image.
Beautiful things don’t last very long in
Baltimore, though, and soon everything Vincent has worked for so he can be his
own boss is going to shit. Two cops who know him from back in the day when he
was a stone-cold killer, Detectives Holloway (Michael K. Williams) and Pratt
(Russell Hornsby), think he’s involved in eight bodies that just dropped and
want Vincent to talk. He can’t get legitimate funds from a bank because he’s
using another identity to get the loan and that identity has an already-delinquent
loan. And his old boss, high-level drug kingpin Mr. Fish (Dennis Haysbert), is
looking for him—and no matter what Vincent’s friend Arthur (Danny Glover)
assures him, when Mr. Fish is after you, that can’t be good.
As LUV builds suspense upon suspense, it’s
clear things won’t end well for Vincent. They just can’t. But the question
here, really, is Woody’s soul, the goodness and innocence in him that’s slowly
being choked by Baltimore’s street culture. Vincent wants to teach Woody how to
be a man, but he’s not really a successful one, is he? There are too many
secrets, too many “beefs from back in the day,” that keep Vincent from pursuing
his goals. And those same issues might plague Woody, too.
When LUV focuses on Vincent and Woody,
the movie is electric. There’s an ease to the rapport and relationship between
Common and Rainey that is effective and affecting, and when you see Woody
really able to let go around his uncle—hanging out of the car’s window, smiling
with the glee of playing hooky—there’s serious likeability. You’ll feel for
this kid, and you’ll get angry at Vincent as he does all these things to force
him to grow up in far too short of a time. When a kid is 11, does he really
need to know how to drive? Or talk to a girl? Or shoot a gun? Dammit, Vincent!
Stop ruining this kid’s life!
And it’s when those stakes are raised,
when the film forces us to consider how fucked up Vincent’s life really is,
that things spiral out of control—and the movie falls into stereotypically clichéd
territory. Oh, you’re a bad guy who wants to leave the life behind? Right, that’s
never happened in a movie before.
Common sells it, and is actually impressive as a man conflicted and plagued by
doubt. But even though a bunch of stellar actors from The Wire show up, and
even though the film really demonstrates how complex Baltimore can be as a
city, the narrative becomes simultaneously too simplistic and too ridiculous.
There are too many twists and turns involving Fish’s plan for Vincent, too many
lies between Vincent and Woody, too many plot contrivances and conveniences. The
film’s middle section resembles a mimicry of Spike Lee’s The 25th
Hour, and the finale is too melodramatic to be powerful.
Woody asks Vincent at one point, “How
you expect me to learn if you don’t tell me nothing?” The problem with LUV is
it tells us too much.
2.5 out of 5 Guttenbergs
