Rosewood Rating ** Worth seeing Directed by John Singleton Written by Gregory Poirier With Jon Voight, Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Bruce McGill, Loren Dean, and Esther Rolle.
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As a director, Singleton shares with Furious a didactic streak. Singleton is no demagogue, but his fast-action style tends to erase the nuances of interracial dynamics: in Rosewood white animosity erupts like the lava that torches another defenseless town in the latest volcano thriller, Dante’s Peak. Seeking a quasi-mythic tale of an African-American rite of passage, Singleton revisits the turf of Boyz N the Hood. In fact, both movies seem indebted for their boys-to-men motifs to Star Wars, a movie Singleton avowedly worships. Reminiscing for the Fox television special hyping the “special edition,” Singleton says of the storybook-style opening scene, “Anybody who knows me knows my life was changed at that moment.”
In the overschematic Rosewood two boys, white Emmett and black Arnett, face two sides of the Force in backwoods Florida and emerge into manhood. The fiery, bloody baptism is triggered by a married white woman who vaguely blames a stranger for the vicious beating she received from her white lover on the morning of January 1, 1923. In Singleton’s Rosewood, Fanny Taylor (Catherine Kellner) sobs theatrically: “He was so big! He was so black!” Poor whites from Sumner, a company town owned by a lumber mill, rally to track down the illusory assailant–and vent their resentment of Rosewood’s economically self-sufficient home owners. During the ensuing ugly carnival–spearheaded by the Klan and spiked with liquor–a white mother peels her little boy’s hands away from his eyes and forces him to watch a white man slice an ear from a lynched black man. Meanwhile, four white hunters pose triumphantly for a photo in front of two charred corpses tied to a tree.
More often, though, Rosewood clubs the audience. The opening scenes fill the frames with wooden signs around Rosewood for the church, the Mason hall, the piano teacher’s house, and a land auction (later the arena for racial territorialism). Signs played a similar symbolic role in Boyz N the Hood, in which a group of black kids walking to school and talking about shootings are framed by “one way” and “wrong way” street signs. Rosewood ends with comparable typographic exhortations, with the words “survivors,” “African-Americans,” and “white” capitalized in titles that describe the aftermath of the Rosewood incident.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Rosewood film still.
