Poetry:
Oser, Lee
VIF When I went to John Singleton's feature debut, Boyz 'n the Hood, I was expecting sociology, but what I got was a work of art. Higher Learning, his new movie about sexual and racial tensions on...
...And that rally that opens this movie-what's going on there...
...Commonweal 24 February 1995: 55...
...A skinhead making nefarious plans is given the crescent moon lighting that Brando received in Apocalypse Now...
...Singleton has been looking at too many movies lately...
...HEROINE: Yourself...
...Worse, Lawrence Fishburne, one of the best American actors alive, has saddled himself with an accent meant to convey that his character is third-world born but Oxbridge-educated...
...Not only is Riefenstahl an undigested influence but so are Coppola and David Lean...
...He doesn't know who he is...
...A political protest...
...He should have been blasted with harsh light, not bathed in artsy-fartsy shadows...
...That numbly noticed, inconsequential shoe perfectly conveys the young woman's fearful state...
...The office of the professor played by Lawrence Fishburne doesn't look like a teacher's office but an admissions department...
...PROFESSOR FISHBURNE: Information is power...
...For all I know, the campus mall may be a real mall but, judging from what we see on screen, he could have used a stage set...
...And the acting...
...But Brando's Kurtz was meant to be as mysterious as the moon, while the skinhead is an obvious thug with no evil resonance whatsoever...
...I saw cheerleaders twirling, but Singleton shoots the scene as if it were Hitler's Nuremberg party congress as captured by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will...
...And how do people convey intelligence in this movie titled Higher Learning...
...When one student, trying to study, is driven out of his dorm room by the blasting stereo of his roommate, he never thinks of going to the student union building...
...But Singleton hasn't absorbed the classics from which he's trying to draw sustenance...
...But note that Passage's director, David Lean, in a stroke of genius, put in a seemingly irrelevant detail: Miss Quested fastens her gaze for one moment on an onlooker's shoe...
...At intervals a pink light is on everything, or a shadow stretches endless fingers touching you like the sun...
...But he's in bad trouble anywaythe worst sort of trouble an artist can have...
...This movie is turning a profit at the box office, so John Singleton will work again...
...Scorsese showed his colleagues Hitchcock's The Wrong Man before beginning Taxi Driver, and The Heiress was the model for The Age of Innocence...
...RICHARD ALLEVA Lee Oser Mosaic Days Pieces of mosaic, the days lie scattered on the table, sparkling in their dust...
...Higher Learning, his new movie about sexual and racial tensions on campus, is not only sociology, but the most naive, flat-footed sort imaginable...
...You arrange them with gladiolas or bowls of silver rain and the wind flutters round like a voiceless bird...
...That brings up another problem...
...Just consider the campus that Singleton presents us with: it's just a hunk of ground on which the director got permission to shoot...
...There's no there there...
...The days may hasten to Jerusalem, or to a wife, a city herself speaking a language you hardly understand, or to a friend who passed away or to a kind of paradise...
...Directors often sharpen their visions of what their projects should look like by screening whatever classic has inspired them for their collaborators...
...A welcome party for freshmen...
...But how could he, since Singleton doesn't give this campus a student union, though such a building is usually the center of campus life...
...Singleton's tracking shot, by contrast, is just a film-school tactic, mechanically executed and devoid of surprise...
...I can't think of any recent film that extolled so highly the benefits of knowledge and yet displayed such ignorance in every frame, every line of dialogue, and each turn of an utterly mechanical plotignorance of the academic scene, ignorance of what makes a drama compelling, ignorance of life itself...
...The only sign left of the Singleton who made Boyz is in this movie's propulsion: he's still enough of a filmmaker to keep our eyes on the screen, but that won't stop any viewer who's lived a little from wincing at the callowness he sees there...
...And so you disappear and reappear stepping through streets like so many photographs like aerial shots from different eras...
...So Fishburne gets to pronounce "peppermint" as "pepper m8nt...
...HERO: Who do I have to prove myself to...
...Pass the watercress and sandwiches...
...A pregame bacchanal...
...It's a work of good intentions, and these intentions seem to have leached every last ounce of originality out of Singleton and much of his intelligence of well...
...When the heroine slowly weaves to a microphone at a feminist rally (lots of rallies in this movie) to declare herself a rape victim, the camera's slow track forward representing her point-of-view is a steal from Passage to India: Miss Quested's reeling progress to the witness stand to testify about her alleged rape...
...In the male lead, Omar Epps, though not particularly memorable, has vigor and snap, but all the other young players are just so many blobs...
...HERO: I want power...
...Quietly, through doors and locks, they return at night to you...
Vol. 122 • February 1995 • No. 4
