**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
starring Taye Diggs, Sanaa Lathan, Mos Def, Nicole Ari Parker
screenplay by Michael Elliot and Rick Famuyiwa
directed by Rick Famuyiwa
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a lot of talk of integrity in Brown Sugar, and a lot more of the defiant nature of good hip-hop; if the film embodied either of those traits in its words or pictures it would be a perfect ten. Alas, for all of Brown Sugar's hue and cry over the mainstreaming of the music, the film is tediously commonplace in its attitudes; director/co-writer Rick Famuyiwa treats hip-hop mania like the sedate cream-coloured furniture his protagonists seem to enjoy–just another tony item to be collected. He simply isn't smart or passionate enough to evoke an obsessive love for anything, be it musical or human, and both his romance plot and his professing of musical devotion are borrowings from other movies and conversations overheard. While it's too low-key and oblivious to be offensive (and the furniture does have its qualities), it makes no impression at all beyond the miracle one fluky, inspired performance that belongs in a better movie.
One tries to warn readers against spoilers, but how can one issue a warning when the plot is largely revealed by the words "like When Harry Met Sally?" The film's tale of music critic Sidney (Sanaa Lathan) and record executive Dre (Taye Diggs) is hugely derivative of that rom-com landmark, taking the earlier film's when-are-they-gonna-get-together conflict and leaching out all of the nuance that made it memorable. True, Fumiyawa and company try to differentiate their pair of friends with a love of hip-hop–the twosome met on the street corner where they discovered the sacred sound. But they do so in such an oafish and expository way as to reduce the two spouters of (unconvincing rhetoric). Yeah, he hates the pimps-and-hos mentality on his roster, and yeah, she, uh, works too much, but their jobs and beliefs are merely window-dressing for some boring plot contrivances involving equally boring significant others. Even if you've never heard of Rob Reiner, you know what's coming, and the "twists" that block the way are simply frustrations in a headlong rush to a foregone conclusion.
This wouldn't have mattered had Fumiyawa the aesthetic chops to make the film into a hyperbolic fantasy, or evoked the ecstatic hip-hop feeling to which everyone keeps alluding. But he's a tragically limited director without a conceptual mind who never brings out the emotions that might have sold the deal on his oft-told tale. For one thing, he lights as if someone were performing open-heart surgery on the set: you get to see everything clearly, but only for the most functional purposes imaginable. For another, he has replaced the concept of production design with a furniture showroom, where every stick has been selected for its display value and not for what it reveals about the characters. To truly do the script justice, he would have had to match a passion for film with the passion that his characters (ostensibly) have for hip-hop–his total insensitivity to form traps all of his talented actors (the excellent Lathan especially) in an artistic cul-de-sac.
Maybe not all. There is the matter of Mos Def, whose sensibility is so singular and so bizarre that one has to wonder: what the hell is he doing in this crummy little movie? He plays Chris, the laconic cabbie/MC on whom Dre/Diggs tries to bestow stardom, and the combination of his one-size-too-large-frame and smiley, blissed-out delivery demolishes the phony platitudes that everyone else has to take as gospel. Lines that have no business getting laughs get the only laughs in the movie, and while everyone else in the cast struggles with their ill-fitting roles like the professional actors they are, Mos Def comes up with hilarious nuances and effects that a standard "serious" actor could never match. Faced with the inconsequential nature of the script, he simply pretends that he's in another movie, and uses his gentle but vibrant physical presence to blast the supporting cast off the screen. He believes in his role more than the filmmakers do and as such winds up embodying the hip-hop ideal better than anything else in the movie; I hadn't heard any of his music prior to seeing Brown Sugar, but if it's as wigged-out and joyous as his performance here, I want his entire back catalogue. Originally published: October 11, 2002.
THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Fox's DVD release of Brown Sugar presents the film in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen and unmatted editions on opposite sides of a DVD-10. The image is quite smooth and lush, though compression artifacts occasionally intrude, as is wont to happen when squeezing separate versions of a 109-minute film onto a single-layer disc. (This new mania for fullscreen is coming at a cost to quality, thereby defeating the DVD format's objective; studios need to be less accommodating of the Wal-Mart crowd, or else they'll never learn.) Brown Sugar shines in the audio department on DVD: the 5.1 Dolby Digital soundtrack on board makes hip hop sound about as good as it can to my allergic ears, though only the music ever peeps through the surround channels–beyond the tunes, this is a typical romantic-comedy mix, reliant almost exclusively upon the centre speaker.
Barry White-voiced director Rick Famuyiwa and editor Dirk Westervelt contribute a feature-length commentary during which both sound like they're anesthetized; the pair offers an interesting overview of how they did it but rarely why, except when discussing the decision to shoot in New York rather than have another city double for The Big Apple. Famuyiwa and a silent Westervelt return for a section of four deleted scenes, the first of which is horrifying (Method Man and a magazine editor threaten each other at gunpoint), though Famuyiwa seems to think that violence in the music industry is cute. In another omission, Sanaa Lathan's Sydney invites her beau in for a "cup of sex–I mean, coffee"–move over, Noel Coward! Videos for Erykah Badu featuring Common's "Love of My Life (An Ode to Hip Hop)" and Mos Def feat. Faith Evans's "Brown Sugar (Extra Sweet)," a soundtrack promo for Brown Sugar, and trailers for Brown Sugar and the god-awful Antwone Fisher round out the disc.
109 minutes; PG-13; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced), 1.33:1; English DD 5.1; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-10; Region One; Fox
