Saturday, October 05, 2002

Barbershop

A bit later than I originally intended, I finally got around to seeing Barbershop tonight. If you haven't done so as well, I highly recommend you follow suit: it's an excellent film, which pulls off the almost-impossible feat of being popular without having to give up its intelligence.

Most of the film is set in the barbershop of the title, a barely-going concern which was inherited by its proprietor, Calvin (Ice Cube) from his father. It's been the place where colourful Chicago south siders have hung out and shot the breeze for over 40 years, and only when he sells it does Calvin finally appreciate how much it really means.

Sounds hokey? Well, it is, a little, but not uncomfortably so. And the Message is delivered with so much humour and panache that it never stirs up any resentment. There's also a broad slapstick subplot about a pair of Laurel-and-Hardy small time crooks trying to rip off an ATM machine, which not only keeps the laughs coming when the situation back in the barbershop gets too serious, but also serves to give the camera a little fresh air. Without that subplot, the film would essentially be a claustrophobic stage play.

And for all that it takes place pretty much entirely in the same location, a transferred stage play à la Six Degrees of Separation or Glengarry Glen Ross this is not. There's very little in the way of character development: the film basically takes a set of sterotypes, puts them in the barbershop, and then has each one redeem himself in turn. The oreo and the wigger start out fighting and end up as friends, the twice-convicted felon helps solve a crime, the put-upon girlfriend asserts herself and dumps her boyfriend, and the overweight African ends up getting the girl. Sophisticated character development this is not.

Another thing that Barbershop isn't: "Smoke moved to the South Side of Chicago," as I guessed it might be in my September 17 blog. Calvin is no Auggie Wren, although Eddie, the character played with relish by Cedric the Entertainer, would not be out of place in the Brooklyn tobacconist, opining in his hilariously anti-pc way on the subjects of Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, OJ Simpson, and other icons of African-American history.

It's because of those lines that Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and others have called for a boycott of the movie, not (thankfully) that anybody seems to be paying them the slightest bit of attention. But if anything is really offensive about the film, it's not a couple of lines put into the mouth of an eccentric old barber who never has anybody in his chair.

For it's not the treatment of African-American icons which rankles, but rather the treatment of Africans. Dinka (Dinka!), the African character played by Leonard Earl Howze, isn't even given a specific country from which he's meant to come (unlike the Punjabi convenience-store owner across the street, who corrects the misapprehension that he's Pakistani). He is a naive doofus who seeks – successfully – to learn from his American brothers, a man who finally gets what he wants not by dint of his charming love of poetry so much as through the delivery of a well-timed left hook.

Still, one can only get so offended by the portrayal of any given character in this film, given how broadly painted most of them are. And Dinka gets one of the most touching scenes in the film: when the girl he gave a card to asks him whether he wrote the poem inside himself, he breaks into a mile-wide, completely unselfconscious grin, and proudly says that no, it was actually Pablo Neruda.

It's scenes like that, or the one where Calvin is being chased through the icy streets of Chicago by a thug trying to give him $20,000, which stick with you after you've seen the film. Barbershop never takes itself too seriously, and so when, occasionally, it comes to a note of grace – when Eddie, for instance, shows how really to shave a man – we feel elevated, rather than preached at.

So go see this film. You won't learn anything about human nature, about African-American life in the inner city, or even about cutting hair. But you will have a good time, you won't feel as though your intelligence has been insulted, and you will greatly admire the central performance by Ice Cube. In a time when Hollywood films in general and African-American films in particular nearly always play for the lowest of the lowest common denominators, that's an achievement to applaud.

Posted by Felix at 10:51 EST