Baby Boy

Baby Boy

Young black men should look for employment instead of fathering children carelessly, living with their mothers and this is the message that John Singleton’s “Baby Boy” tries to put across. It also criticizes the society which forces them into such a corner. No film has ever taken such an approach on African-American experience before.

To men like its protagonist, the movie says: yes racism contributed but do you really need to aid it so much with your own attitude? In the first scene we meet 20-year old Jody(Tyrese Gibson) who has two kids by different women and still stays in his mother’s house-room. He drives his girlfriend Yvette(Taraji P Henson) from clinic where she has just had an abortion back home. She is understandably sad and hurting, a little dopey from pills. She doesn’t feel like talking. “In that case”, he tells himself if she won’t mind he borrows her car. So he does and goes with it to see his other girlfriend.

Mary A. Mitchell, the Sun Times columnist who has written series of sorrowful enraged articles about absent fathers and “man-sharing” in black community; where drugs, crime and prison have created dearth of eligible males. Writing that way takes guts because African-American community likes showing a positive face while keeping its self-criticism behind closed doors. She is criticized for what she writes.

Now Singleton also dares take harsh look at his own people. Ten years ago when he was young man made movie called ‘Boyz N The Hood’ about young men telling great story. Today same neighborhood South Central L.A. But characters are little older now, and so is he less forgiving.

“Baby Boy” doesn’t indulge easy liberal finger pointing. There are no white people here, no simple blaming others ;the adults in Jody’s life blame him for his problems, and rightly so. At some point as Jody’s mother Juanita(AJ Johnson) tells him over and over again he needs to grow up, move out, get a job and support his family.

No response from Jody other than an accusation of not loving him. His life is good and he does not see the need to work for a living. He depends on two women for his support: his mother, and Yvette who works. Peanut (Tamara Bass), the mother of his other child is still in the picture too. But it is Yvette that he loves most. Still, he plays around, and she knows it and sort of lets it happen because she gets mad when she can never drive her own car, which she’s making payments on.

She yells at him about lying to her, and his answer is a logical masterpiece: “I’m out in these streets telling these ‘hos the truth. I lie to you because I care about you.” All would be well if Jody could keep on sleeping in his childhood bedroom (where he still builds model cars), eat his mother’s cooking, drive Yvette? car around L.A., sleep with his women especially Sweetpea’s sister and hang with his boys’ especially Sweetpea (Omar Gooding). But Yvette has had enough; Sweetpea is getting involved with dangerous gang types; Yvette’s old boyfriend (Snoop Dogg) is out of prison and hanging around.

And at home, most disturbingly, Juanita has a new boyfriend named Melvin (Ving Rhames), who has no patience with him. Melvin spent 10 years in the slammer, is determined to go straight, has a landscaping business, moves into the house and marks his territory. It was clear things were different when Jody walked into the house one day and found Melvin stark-naked frying eggs for Juanita in the kitchen. “I was like you ,Jody,” he says.”Young, dumb, and out of control.

“Juanita herself is a piece of work, a still-youthful woman who loves her backyard garden, and tries patiently, over and over, to cut through Jody’s martyrdom and evasion. When he complains to her that Yvette has locked him out, she levels: “What would you do if Yvette [expletive] all around on you, took your car and left you in a hot house all day with a baby?” An excellent question. Yvette answers it, in a way, by stealing back her own car, so the “baby boy” is reduced to riding his childhood bicycle around the neighborhood.

When John Singleton burst on the scene with “Boyz N the Hood,” he brought the freshness of direct everyday experience to movies about black Americans. He was still in his mid-20s; he had just got out of South Central; he was already a legend for how at 16 he started hanging around the USC film school volunteering as a gofer until the dean concluded. “We might as well make him a student since he acts like he is one anyway.” Singleton comes from this same background himself; knows these characters; sees himself and his friends in them. Like many self-made men, he lacks patience with those who do not even try.

He has an eye for good actors. “Boyz” was Cuba Gooding Jr.’s first film. Here we meet Cuba’s brother Omar (who plays Sweetpea), also gifted. Tyrese Gibson, already known as a singer, model and music video DJ ,is a natural unaffected actor who brings considerable charm to Jody.

Yvette, played by Taraji P. Henson, has the most difficult scenes in “Baby Boy.” She loves her man, but despairs of him; she’s tired of working and caring for children and men like this 20-year old “baby boy.” A.J. Johnson and Ving Rhames, as the mother and her ex-con boyfriend, have a wonderful rapport; they have an exuberant sex life, feel they deserve a second chance at happiness, and are just old enough to be fed up with Jody’s know nothing ways.

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