ON FILM

Van Peebles turns stereotypes upside down

— Mario Van Peebles is calling from the road.

Actually, he’s in a soul food restaurant in Atlanta, where he’s attending the Peachtree Village International Film Festival. While he’s there, he’s checking out Morehouse College with his son. He’s also doing what he can to promote his latest movie, Redemption Road, which is opening in eight markets - including Little Rock - today.

As it turns out, his call is a minor surprise. It’s a few hours earlier than scheduled. I’d mentioned to the publicist who’d set it up at the last minute that my schedule was pretty tight, that I wished it hadn’t been scheduled for so late in the day, and a few minutes later, my cell vibrates and a voice says, “Hey, it’s Mario.”

He’s got a few minutes now, maybe he’ll call back later, at the appointed time, as well? If it helps.

Now this is pretty much unheard of in my years of experience waiting on movie people to call. (He’s also apparently calling me from his personal cell phone, with an unblocked number. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that.) As a matter of fact, I don’t have any questions prepared (not that I really ever do) and I’m actually in the middle of writing my review of his film - which is when I really figure out what I think about a movie.

So I tell him about a book I’m reading, Jamaican-American Claude McKay’s 1928 novel Home to Harlem, an important work of the Harlem renaissance, which portrayed the Prohibition-era speak-easies of New York’s black neighborhoods so graphically that W.E.B. Du Bois (McKay’s hero, by the way) claimed to be “nauseated” by it.

Du Bois was more concerned with political and cultural assimilation than the vicissitudes of art, but the fact is that black artists in America still labor under separate and unequal expectations. But sometimes they make this work for them - I can’t help but consider Redemption Road a more interesting movie in the context of Van Peebles’ career and biography.

He agrees the movie doesn’t seem like an obvious choice for him to direct, and that he might not have been the producer’s first thought. It’s a fairly typical road movie with two characters who initially seem to have little in common but eventually bond and help each other heal. The story plays out against the backdrop of the rural South, a place suffused with American roots music - blues, country and gospel. The two characters are iconic types, with a twist: The hard-drinkin’ bluesman is a young white man (played by Morgan Simpson, a relatively unknown actor who co-wrote the script) while the linedancing, platitude-spouting, cowboy-hatted stranger who shows up to carry him home is played by Michael Clarke Duncan.

We talk about the American imperative for reinvention and the common roots and mixed racial heritage of the blues and country music. (The genres aren’t as black and white as some might think: Consider Charley Pride and Jimmie Rodgers and Deford Bailey.)

“Yeah, I like the idea of playing with these iconic characters, and giving them a little tweak, a little twist,” Van Peebles says. When I bring up a possibly touchy subject - that Duncan is playing a variation of a stereotypical character sometimes called the “magical negro,” Van Peebles enthusiastically agrees.

He’s using Duncan’s filmic heritage - he played the convict John Coffey, often cited as a particularly good example of the magical negro trope in Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile - to lend ballast to this character, who turns out, in the end, to be far more complicated and haunted than we initially perceive.

There’s something in this - though neither Duncan’s black country music fan nor the “white boy lost in the blues” that Simpson portrays is a completely novel idea. Duncan’s history matters, and so does the director’s - Van Peebles, after all, is the son of one of the most important voices in American black cinema, Melvin Van Peebles, the auteur who more or less demonstrated the viability of so-called “blaxploitation” films with the seminal Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971.

(The elder Van Peebles also starred in that film and cast Mario as his character’s younger self. Mario returns the favor in Redemption Road, giving his father a small but memorable role. In 2003, Mario wrote, directed and starred as his father in Baadasssss!, a highly entertaining movie about the making of that movie.)

And Mario directed the hip-hop crime movie New Jack City, a recombinant film that featured fiercely compelling performances from Wesley Snipes, Ice-T and Chris Rock (in a genuinely great performance that he’s never come close to duplicating) as the tortured crackhead Pookie.

“And that film was just jampacked with references to old Hollywood gangster films and Westerns,” Van Peebles points out, when I allow that in some ways - its visual palette and use of music - Redemption Road feels like a “country cousin” to New Jack City.

Like his father, the younger Van Peebles is a quadruple threat artist who’s worked as an actor, director, writer and composer - he even wrote and performed one of the songs on the Redemption Road soundtrack, a country inflected tune called “Pick Your Friends Wisely.”

Van Peebles is happy the film is finally coming out - it’s been in the can awhile; it played a lot of film festivals (including Little Rock’s) under the title Black, White and Blues - though it’s clear his expectations for it are modest.

It won’t define his career; he’s on to new projects now - he’s wrapped production on the feature We the Party, starring Michael Jai White and Snoop Dogg, and he’s directed several episodes of Kelsey Grammer’s new political drama, Boss, which premieres on Starz in October.

But he likes Redemption Road - it’s an ultimately “life-affirming” story, a movie he wanted to make about characters who grow beyond their differences - who are ultimately more alike than different. Which is, if you think about it, not such a bad story for these polarized times.

[email protected] blooddirtangels.com

MovieStyle, Pages 31 on 08/26/2011

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