Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins
Directed by Malcolm D. Lee
Bless Their Little Hearts
Directed by Billy Woodberry
at Anthology Film Archives Feb. 15-17
Ever since Philip Larkin’s startling phrase—They Fuck You Up: The Family—splashed on the cover of Granta in 1991, the cultural smart money has been on celebrating family dysfunction rather than seeing past it. This attitude infects numerous movies, yet it misrepresents Larkin’s famous poem, which was about society’s chain of influences (“Man hands on misery to man/ It deepens like a coastal shelf”). Now it’s reduced to indie filmmakers’ own petty neuroses and resentments.
That explains last year’s stampede of poisonous family movies, There Will Be Blood, Gone Baby Gone, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Atonement, The Savages, and Margot at the Wedding. Rather than individual visions, they’re all Granta-hip cinematic attempts at literary depth. Perverting old-fashioned family sentimentality passes for indie-movie courage, but this trend is petulant, not profound.
If Martin Lawrence was an indie filmmaker, his rowdy family comedy Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins might have been full of bitterness. As successful Los Angeles TV personality R. J. Stevens, Lawrence plays a man who returns to his Atlanta hometown for his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary (played by James Earl Jones and Margaret Avery) and shamefacedly reconnects with his discomforting country folk. It’s a situation primed for resentment—to show the ingratitude and impatience of a savvier-than-thou modern-day winner. This could have won Lawrence acclaim for flaunting ugly attitude. But Lawrence doesn’t play that game.
As a frankly commercial performer, Lawrence moves past those arrested-development predicaments where calculating filmmakers depict family obligations as an infantilizing burden. Instead, Lawrence rejects dysfunctional family cliché and makes satire out of family irritations and how an individual like R.J. (who changed his “government name” to a slick, player’s moniker) survives them.
Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins gets lowdown with slapstick, sex jokes and city-vs.-country class antagonisms. Yet this crowd-pleasing acceptance of the vulgar and mundane is so different from how indie filmmakers pretend to probe family relations that viewers are forced to question what’s come to be regarded as the indie movie norm: filmmakers showing their smarts, rejecting homey sentiment and getting back at their parents.
Roscoe suffers blood ambivalence about his aloof father, ineffectual mother and rude siblings, but he comes to understand his situation in a scene that’s surprisingly humble for this lowbrow, crudely directed film. Writer-director Malcolm D. Lee cannot finesse the mechanics of corniness and sentimentality that made the movies Why Did I Get Married? and First Sunday mightily effective pursuits of “heart” over “sophistication.” Lee’s humor is low-grade throughout, sending Roscoe through relentless sitcom embarrassments—via bodacious sister Mo’Nique, muscle-head brother Michael Clark Duncan and disloyal boyhood rival Cedric the Entertainer (he’s memorably scolded as “reneger” ). But this film’s reunion theme crucially resolves Roscoe’s personal issues in order to preserve and extend family relations.
These are not tenets that most indie movies support (both The Darjeeling Limited and The Family Stone got trounced for it), but they’re fundamental to the humane purposes of pop culture. Lee’s hastily contrived solution for Roscoe’s frustration is so full of forgiveness that it reveals a shocking rift between pop and indie movie verities.
In street parlance, Roscoe “mans-up” to every trial his family and gold-digger fiancée put him through and then checks himself. There’s no sense of tantrummy payback like Philip Seymour Hoffman specializes in. This makes Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins restorative—an important effect that indie family movies have lately given up.
Family movie decline can be charted this week by Anthology Film Archives’ revival of one of the finest American indie films, Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts. Since Woodberry’s rarely seen movie debuted at Film Forum in 1984 (he never made a follow-up feature but worked as a community activist, tutoring aspiring filmmakers in Los Angeles), the indie scene has veered away from the family principles that are both Woodberry and Lawrence’s concern. Bless Their Little Hearts uses a script by Charles Burnett that is a variation on Killer of Sheep: protagonist Charlie Banks (Nate Hardman) loses his job and slips into weariness that threatens stability for his three kids and wife (Kaycee Moore). This near-tragic situation, unlike Welcome Home’s farce, is viewed with almost verité solemnity.
Charlie and Roscoe share a familial bond that defines them even as it frustrates them. (Roscoe’s confession that he wasn’t ready for fatherhood shows unusual forthrightness for a pop movie.) These contrasting films honestly confront the dissatisfactions of family life from a working-class African-American perspective, unlike the indie world’s white middle-class view. The similarities of Roscoe and Charlie’s plaints indicate a way of being in the world that today’s indie filmmakers ignore.
The indie preference for smug, negative family stories isn’t really so different from what’s seen on The Jerry Springer Show; it’s just high-toned nihilism—a decadent indulgence only the well-off can afford. That’s why the screenwriters of Margot at the Wedding, Before the Devil and The Savages never achieve the reconciliation Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams’ family plays made cathartic. Roscoe’s speech articulates something of that agonizing blood-deep ambivalence: “Y’all rough on a brother. Y’all pull no punches. Thank you for making me a better man; giving me the strength to endure anything this world throws at you.”
Only a comic actor with Lawrence’s rubber face and mercurial resources could play that resignation before self-respecting audiences. Roscoe’s refusal to lay blame evinces a cultural attitude and resilience that corrects the self-justifying acrimony of indie family films—that bratty privilege to gripe. Even in this third-rate movie, Martin Lawrence eventually speaks to the audience’s sense of honesty and strength of mind.
Snobs may scoff at Roscoe’s cartoonish clan but the Jenkinses are no less credible than the completely false sitcom families in Juno or Little Miss Sunshine. Most importantly, the Jenkinses lack what critic Gregory Solman identified as “the sheen of cynicism” that today’s film culture thinks is smart. Welcome Home may be crude and not nearly as substantive as Bless Their Little Hearts or First Sunday, but its plain language recalls Larkin’s admonition and flips it to address man’s humanity over man.
Directed by Malcolm D. Lee
Bless Their Little Hearts
Directed by Billy Woodberry
at Anthology Film Archives Feb. 15-17
Ever since Philip Larkin’s startling phrase—They Fuck You Up: The Family—splashed on the cover of Granta in 1991, the cultural smart money has been on celebrating family dysfunction rather than seeing past it. This attitude infects numerous movies, yet it misrepresents Larkin’s famous poem, which was about society’s chain of influences (“Man hands on misery to man/ It deepens like a coastal shelf”). Now it’s reduced to indie filmmakers’ own petty neuroses and resentments.
That explains last year’s stampede of poisonous family movies, There Will Be Blood, Gone Baby Gone, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Atonement, The Savages, and Margot at the Wedding. Rather than individual visions, they’re all Granta-hip cinematic attempts at literary depth. Perverting old-fashioned family sentimentality passes for indie-movie courage, but this trend is petulant, not profound.
If Martin Lawrence was an indie filmmaker, his rowdy family comedy Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins might have been full of bitterness. As successful Los Angeles TV personality R. J. Stevens, Lawrence plays a man who returns to his Atlanta hometown for his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary (played by James Earl Jones and Margaret Avery) and shamefacedly reconnects with his discomforting country folk. It’s a situation primed for resentment—to show the ingratitude and impatience of a savvier-than-thou modern-day winner. This could have won Lawrence acclaim for flaunting ugly attitude. But Lawrence doesn’t play that game.
As a frankly commercial performer, Lawrence moves past those arrested-development predicaments where calculating filmmakers depict family obligations as an infantilizing burden. Instead, Lawrence rejects dysfunctional family cliché and makes satire out of family irritations and how an individual like R.J. (who changed his “government name” to a slick, player’s moniker) survives them.
Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins gets lowdown with slapstick, sex jokes and city-vs.-country class antagonisms. Yet this crowd-pleasing acceptance of the vulgar and mundane is so different from how indie filmmakers pretend to probe family relations that viewers are forced to question what’s come to be regarded as the indie movie norm: filmmakers showing their smarts, rejecting homey sentiment and getting back at their parents.
Roscoe suffers blood ambivalence about his aloof father, ineffectual mother and rude siblings, but he comes to understand his situation in a scene that’s surprisingly humble for this lowbrow, crudely directed film. Writer-director Malcolm D. Lee cannot finesse the mechanics of corniness and sentimentality that made the movies Why Did I Get Married? and First Sunday mightily effective pursuits of “heart” over “sophistication.” Lee’s humor is low-grade throughout, sending Roscoe through relentless sitcom embarrassments—via bodacious sister Mo’Nique, muscle-head brother Michael Clark Duncan and disloyal boyhood rival Cedric the Entertainer (he’s memorably scolded as “reneger” ). But this film’s reunion theme crucially resolves Roscoe’s personal issues in order to preserve and extend family relations.
These are not tenets that most indie movies support (both The Darjeeling Limited and The Family Stone got trounced for it), but they’re fundamental to the humane purposes of pop culture. Lee’s hastily contrived solution for Roscoe’s frustration is so full of forgiveness that it reveals a shocking rift between pop and indie movie verities.
In street parlance, Roscoe “mans-up” to every trial his family and gold-digger fiancée put him through and then checks himself. There’s no sense of tantrummy payback like Philip Seymour Hoffman specializes in. This makes Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins restorative—an important effect that indie family movies have lately given up.
Family movie decline can be charted this week by Anthology Film Archives’ revival of one of the finest American indie films, Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts. Since Woodberry’s rarely seen movie debuted at Film Forum in 1984 (he never made a follow-up feature but worked as a community activist, tutoring aspiring filmmakers in Los Angeles), the indie scene has veered away from the family principles that are both Woodberry and Lawrence’s concern. Bless Their Little Hearts uses a script by Charles Burnett that is a variation on Killer of Sheep: protagonist Charlie Banks (Nate Hardman) loses his job and slips into weariness that threatens stability for his three kids and wife (Kaycee Moore). This near-tragic situation, unlike Welcome Home’s farce, is viewed with almost verité solemnity.
Charlie and Roscoe share a familial bond that defines them even as it frustrates them. (Roscoe’s confession that he wasn’t ready for fatherhood shows unusual forthrightness for a pop movie.) These contrasting films honestly confront the dissatisfactions of family life from a working-class African-American perspective, unlike the indie world’s white middle-class view. The similarities of Roscoe and Charlie’s plaints indicate a way of being in the world that today’s indie filmmakers ignore.
The indie preference for smug, negative family stories isn’t really so different from what’s seen on The Jerry Springer Show; it’s just high-toned nihilism—a decadent indulgence only the well-off can afford. That’s why the screenwriters of Margot at the Wedding, Before the Devil and The Savages never achieve the reconciliation Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams’ family plays made cathartic. Roscoe’s speech articulates something of that agonizing blood-deep ambivalence: “Y’all rough on a brother. Y’all pull no punches. Thank you for making me a better man; giving me the strength to endure anything this world throws at you.”
Only a comic actor with Lawrence’s rubber face and mercurial resources could play that resignation before self-respecting audiences. Roscoe’s refusal to lay blame evinces a cultural attitude and resilience that corrects the self-justifying acrimony of indie family films—that bratty privilege to gripe. Even in this third-rate movie, Martin Lawrence eventually speaks to the audience’s sense of honesty and strength of mind.
Snobs may scoff at Roscoe’s cartoonish clan but the Jenkinses are no less credible than the completely false sitcom families in Juno or Little Miss Sunshine. Most importantly, the Jenkinses lack what critic Gregory Solman identified as “the sheen of cynicism” that today’s film culture thinks is smart. Welcome Home may be crude and not nearly as substantive as Bless Their Little Hearts or First Sunday, but its plain language recalls Larkin’s admonition and flips it to address man’s humanity over man.
