John Singleton's Baby Boy Is a Complex, Intelligent, Promising Film that Fails to Get Outside of Itself

The baby boy of Baby Boy is a 20-year-old South Central L.A. kid named Jody (Tyrese Gibson), a tall, lean, shaved-bald kid who can look as hard as the hardest convict but isn't nearly as hard as he thinks. He's an ex-hood who's put a little distance between himself and the old life?but not too much, because you gotta have somebody to get high with. He's fathered two kids by two women, Yvette (Taraji P. Henson) and Peanut (Tamara LaSeon Bass) and isn't as involved with their lives as he thinks he is. He gives himself credit for caring at all, but from the women's point of view, he's basically just a charming screwup who stops by every now and then for sex and a quick loan.

Jody lives with his mother Juanita (A.J. Johnson) and loves her dearly, but wishes her burly new boyfriend, an O.G. named Melvin (Ving Rhames), would move the hell out of the house, instead of stalking around like he owns the place and making Jody feel like a guest who overstayed his welcome. Which, point of fact, he is.

So far, so good. You don't see guys like Jody in major movies these days. At times, he seems more like the hero of a serious American dramatic movie from the 70s?the kind of guy you couldn't stop watching even though he's a very troubled person who does things that should make you hate him. Thanks to first-time feature film star Gibson's easygoing, mostly reactive brand of macho, you feel what Jody is feeling and want him to be happy?even though most of his problems are his own doing. The only other major American directors who prefer unlikable heroes are Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen?auteurs whose names still mean something to casual moviegoers, even when their movies don't deliver. Baby Boy's writer-director, John Singleton, belongs in that weight class solely on the basis of his debut film, 1991's Boyz N the Hood?a pop phenomenon that made him the youngest filmmaker to be nominated for an Oscar as best director, ahead of Orson Welles. Singleton is no Welles, but he has Wellesian qualities: a weakness for Important Subject Matter (the teaching of prejudice in Higher Learning; lynching in Rosewood; the roots of inner-city, black male rage in Baby Boy); a desire to supervise every single detail of production; a knack for crowd-pleasing humor and suspense and an astonishing debut.

Baby Boy isn't anywhere near as good as Boyz (what is?), yet it's fascinating?a movie that captures all of its director's strengths and weaknesses and then some. It follows a character somewhat like Doughboy, the cynical, supremely self-reliant gangbanger played by Ice Cube in Boyz, through a facsimile of adulthood in South Central. Along the way, it connects with Singleton's troubled domestic life as chronicled in gossip columns: domestic-abuse charges, kids by different women, a long record of self-justifying macho statements. But where Boyz touched on some of the external forces that turned South Central into a war zone in the 80s and early 90s, Baby Boy turns its gaze inward; and unlike a great 70s antihero, Jody is often faced with situations that preserve his delusions instead of challenging them. The result is a film with moments of great clarity?moments that put Jody's self-pitying line of b.s. in perspective, like the sequence where Jody retires to his room and lovingly works on model cars, or the scene where Yvette angrily reclaims her often-borrowed car from Jody, and he rides to confront her on a low-riding bicycle. (He's joined by barely pubescent neighborhood kids, who ride alongside him like the cavalry; it's like Pee-wee N the Hood.)

But Singleton loves his hero so much that he can't dissect him too ruthlessly. That's why, when Jody's women make valid points about his immaturity and selfishness, Singleton often photographs their tirades in harsh closeups that seem designed to make you wish, like Jody, that they'd just shut the hell up for two seconds. (The script makes a big deal about how Jody is on good terms with both women, but halfway through the narrative Singleton all but forgets about Peanut and her baby.)

Like Boyz, Higher Learning and the rest of his work, Baby Boy marks Singleton as a passionate, talented filmmaker who can't resist trying to have it both ways: to celebrate the same myth of righteous macho violence he pretends to debunk. When Jody gripes about Melvin drinking all his Kool-Aid and fixing scrambled eggs in the nude (the great Ving Rhames is game for anything), the film acknowledges that Jody doesn't have a leg to stand on. Yet Singleton still plays up Melvin's threatening demeanor to preserve sympathy for Jody; the big man whispers threats into his ear and even chokes Jody as punishment for telling him off. By the time the credits roll, Jody has grown to respect Melvin, and the incident seems like a special kind of Tough Love. (As Singleton is fond of saying, it takes a man to raise a son.)

The deck-stacking doesn't stop there. During a vicious argument late in the film, Jody hits Yvette, but only because she hit him first. (Honest, officer.) And rapper Snoop Dogg shows up as Yvette's first boyfriend, Rodney, a hardcore gangbanger who's so cartoonishly loathsome that Jody can kill him with a clear conscience if he decides to go that route.

In Singleton's movies, there is always a tension between what a man's brain tells him about violence (it's the road to ruin) and what his balls tell him (what are you, some kind of pussy?). Singleton yearns for Real Men, meaning men whose violent impulses are harnessed for the greater good of the family, or the community (think of Larry Fishburne's Furious Styles defending his home with a giant handgun in Boyz), then diminishes their heroism by reveling in the exploits of badass fantasy figures?figures that exist mainly to give young viewers the kneejerk exploitation thrills a mindlessly violent culture has conditioned them to expect.

Ice Cube occupied the wish-fulfillment role in Higher Learning, playing a college revolutionary who taunted campus cops and urged retaliatory violence against skinheads; the character was an intellectualized cousin of Doughboy, Cube's character in Boyz, who coolly executed a friend's murderer after the conflicted hero bailed en route to the final showdown. (If Boyz were serious about repudiating gang violence, it wouldn't have lingered over Doughboy's revenge, or granted him a low, heroic angle as he leveled his gun; if Baby Boy were serious about the same agenda, it wouldn't end with Jody pulling a Chuck Bronson.)

The late Tupac Shakur, one of the finest young actors of the 90s, filled a similar role as the hardcase boyfriend of the title character in Poetic Justice?a sad-eyed nihilist, cruder and less educated than the heroine, but a lot wiser. (Singleton originally wrote Baby Boy as a vehicle for Shakur; in the film, a Tupac mural hangs over Jody's bed, reminding him of the consequences of thug life and inspiring Gibson to act his butt off.)

Rosewood, an otherwise reasonably accurate account of a real-life mass lynching in the 1920s, made room for a fabricated black World War I vet named (cough) Mann, a cigar-chewing Eastwood manque who blasted rampaging crackers from the back of a moving train. The film's denouement saw the white bitch whose false rape accusation started the whole tragedy getting a righteous beating from her man. Singleton's Shaft remake gave audiences a hero so ruthless that he made Richard Roundtree's original incarnation seem like Mr. Rogers?then threw in Jeffrey Wright's drug lord, a Scorsese-style funny psycho, for good measure. All these characters suggest a filmmaker's childish fantasy of what he might have become if he hadn't been so talented. (Scorsese sometimes has the same problem.)

Dave Kehr's mixed review of Boyz in the Chicago Tribune nailed Singleton's Achilles' heel early on: he said the film wanted to be Superfly and The Learning Tree all at once, "?an ambition that doesn't seem quite honest." With Baby Boy, Singleton tries to analyze this central conflict between macho fantasy and adult reality, but settles for self-justifying melodrama instead. Jody is given many opportunities to walk away from violence but consistently refuses to take them?not just because of his social conditioning, but because Singleton fears young male viewers won't be satisfied unless Jody does what a man's gotta do. The result is a complex, intelligent, promising film that fails to get outside of itself?a baby step in the right direction.

Framed

Redneck Vampires: When an exploitation movie is advertised as having been thought lost for decades, there's usually a reason. Lemora, The Lady Dracula, a 1973 redneck vampire movie opening at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater on June 29, is just such a film; it has an Ed Wood-like innocence that keeps you interested even though the film isn't as well made as it could be.

Written and directed by Richard Blackburn, and set in the Depression-era South, it tells the barely comprehensible story of a pubescent gospel-singing angel (Cheryl Smith, of Caged Heat) who gets a mysterious message to take a bus to the hill country to meet with her creepy gangster father, who is missing and presumed dead. Once there, she encounters an undead cult headed by the title character (Lesley Gilb), a hooded female bloodsucker with lesbian tendencies who gives our heroine the parental love she never quite had, plus a sensual bath. (The lesbian themes got the film condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency.) Gilb, who never gave another film performance, is elegantly creepy, with a voice that sounds like Sigourney Weaver playing a boarding school headmistress, and a long stalking sequence in the film's second half generates a Romero-esque creepy charge. (It's mostly long shots of people rushing around abandoned buildings while crickets chirp on the soundtrack.) But by that point, you'll probably have realized the same thing you always realize whenever you watch an exploitation movie: the idea is better than the execution. No matter: stoners will love it.

Realer than Real: Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, an anime adventure that opened Friday at Cinema Village, invites the question of how realistic animation can get before it becomes irrelevant. A collaboration between Mamoru Oshii and Hiroyuki Okiura?respectively, the writer-director and assistant director of the smash hit Ghost in the Shell?Jin-Roh tells the story of political intrigue in an alternate reality 10 years after World War II, where Tokyo resembles Nazi Germany (complete with retro vehicles and uniforms), and domestic terrorists do Brazil-like battle with hard-armored government police. The narrative focuses on the troubled conscience of Fuse, a cop who trapped a female terrorist and was about to kill her until she detonated a bomb and killed herself. In a nod to Vertigo, Fuse falls in love with the girl's older sister, who looks just like her. There's a tantalizing suggestion that the antiterrorist foot soldiers might be exterminated in order to help the nation forget past conflicts and move on.

But the plot is hard to follow, and Elvis Mitchell's Times review was right to suggest that the same story with real actors would have been much more involving. The rendering of Jin-Roh is so realistic, from the glint of sunlight on metal to the crinkle of uniform fabric, but something's missing: the volatility of human passion.