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THE THEATER — Real-life tragedy is often difficult to recreate on the silver screen.
It’s not that directors or actors can’t offer compelling depictions to recreate these moments — it’s that it can be difficult for an audience to experience again or it may be different than what they remember of the event.
Perhaps that’s why movies about Sept. 11, other terrorist attacks or any public tragedy are often hit or miss in the box office. However, there’s still reason to tell these stories because they can shed light or even offer a positive lesson for audiences.
“The Hate U Give,” which was officially released Oct. 5 but will hit theaters everywhere Friday, is a fictional story, but has serious discussions about racial tension and police brutality that feel all too familiar in the news cycle.
While it’s not the easiest pill to swallow, the movie’s message is worth a listen.
The movie, which is based on the 2017 novel of the same name, centers around Starr Carter, played masterfully by “Hunger Games” actor Amandla Stenberg. We’re immediately cast into the two worlds Starr lives in: her home in a predominantly black, lower-class neighborhood and the affluent, mostly-white high school her parents send her to on the other side of town to avoid the crime and other troubles in her neighborhood school.
We see her code switch between these two worlds. Her father, Maverick (Russell Hornsby), is an ex-convict who left a gang to run a popular neighborhood corner store and raise his three children. He gives the first “talk” when Starr is nine, teaching her and her brothers how to act during a police traffic stop. Meanwhile, her boyfriend, Chris (K.J. Apa), and her best friends at school are white and from more well-to-do families.
The lessons she learned from her father come into play when she and her childhood friend, Khalil (Algee Smith), leave a party after violence breaks out. When they are pulled over by a white police officer, Starr follows what her father told her, while Khalil engages in a verbal confrontation with the officer.
The officer asks Khalil to exit the vehicle and later shoots and kills him after he mistakes a hairbrush that Khalil reaches for as a gun.
That’s when the film moves into a completely new direction. It’s all about the complexities in the two worlds Starr lives in following the incident. Starr, the only witness to the incident, suddenly finds herself torn between her two worlds. There’s sympathy for Khalil in both worlds, but Starr struggles to find sincerity within it.
That’s where director George Tillman, Jr., and screenwriter Audrey Wells shine. It isn’t a film that pins the black community against police. In fact, there’s very little about the officer who shoots Khalil in the film. Rather, it focuses on Starr and her family, and how they navigate the aftermath.
Tillman and others involved show there is power in uniting as a community and using your voice for positive change, and that alone, makes it worth watching.
It’s a tour de force of how persons of color perceive these events, something noticeably lacking in the film industry today. You might cringe at how a television reporter asks Starr about Khalil’s character or how Starr’s classmates treat his death — unaware that Starr witnessed the shooting.
There’s also the problems within the neighborhood, where a kingpin tries to intimidate Starr into not cooperating with the investigation.
All of it leads to the unintended consequences unresolved violence brings to a community, which without giving it away, will certainly break your heart, as it did mine.
The movie has its flaws. Some portions of the plot seem excessive, as if Tillman cherry-picked the worst-case scenarios seen in the news over the past few years and included them as things the family must face. There’s also very little resolved between Starr and her high school classmates, which, aside from Chris, seemingly fall off the map until the very end of the movie.
However, Tillman and others involved show there is power in uniting as a community and using your voice for positive change, and that alone, makes it worth watching.
“The Hate U Give” is rated PG-13 for mature thematic elements, some violent content, drug material and language.
