Directed by Rick Famuyiwa
Written by Michael Elliot and Rick Famuyiwa
Starring Taye Diggs, Sanaa Lathan, Mos Def, Nicole Ari Parker
USA, 2002
Since its birth in the 1950s, there has been no shortage of movies about rock ‘n’ roll. Writer-director Rick Famuyiwa has now attempted his definitive paean to hip-hop, helping to legitimize this younger genre the way cinema has done for rock.
Immediately, we know Brown Sugar is a plainly idealized love song; the title sequence is set to the Roots’ “Act Too (The Love of My Life),” and a little girl in a flashback is shown hopscotching her way through culturally-saturated streets. But, soon thereafter, we also understand that the movie takes sides with the canonizing elitism found in a rock movie like High Fidelity. Bling-blingers currently polluting the airwaves are considerately left unmentioned; references to old-school Boogie Down Productions and Afrika Bambaataa tell us that we are getting an education in the classics.
Famuyiwa gets the foundation right; the music is unimpeachable, the style conversational, and he communicates a youthful passion for the art he advertises. This means that the film is not just a solo expression because hip-hop thrives as much on its collectivism as it does on its roots in the artistic ego. Satisfying comic roles for Mos Def and Queen Latifah show the actual community giving its support.
But Brown Sugar is full of contradictions. As it places alternative rappers on pedestals, the story itself has as much drama as tacky, soulless Ja Rule videos. We never get an authentic sense of the exhilaration of freestyling or the improvisatory charge of hip-hop lyrics. The movie pairs the charming Taye Diggs and Sanaa Lathan in the mainstream dilemma of being lifelong friends and would-be lovers.
Diggs is a record producer and Lathan a hip-hop journalist; they’re two representatives from the clashing worlds of commerce and thought. As they go back and forth between the platonic and the romantic, what becomes most interesting in the movie is what it doesn’t say about the commercializing of free-spirited neo-soul and underground rap. Nonconformity is sellable, and now the Roots are a promotional tool for Heineken beer. This movie about returning to the spirit and originality of earlier rap maintains a nice simplicity but lacks the creativity it endorses.
Brown Sugar wisely avoids equating the competition over degrees of blackness to who is and isn’t from the ghetto, but it still implies the issue. It is largely a white-collar film, though, and it will be interesting to see how it compares to the upcoming Eminem vehicle 8 Mile, which is instead about hip-hop’s significance in the white working class.
By Andrew Chan [OCTOBER 19, 2002; ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER]