GET RICH
OR DIE TRYIN'
50 Cent:
As American as Apple Pie
By
Erica Hector Vital
Red Rock Review
ericavital@cox.net
ericav@theflickchicks.com
What can
be more American than the half dollar? It's a hard currency minted in
silver, embossed with the face of a martyred president who was considered a
bounder in his own right, a product of an immigrant family, Irish to boot,
rumored to have nefarious connections, charming as hell. Armed with
charisma and illegal weaponry, the legacy of the gentleman pirate, as
American as apple pie, continues as there is no current pop product more
dedicated to exercising the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness than rapper turned matinee idol 50 Cent.
Getting
paid and getting laid. Perhaps this is what the powers that be find so
objectionable about the in-your-face ascendance of hip-hop royalty. The
bling is little more than a red cape. It is the bullfighter himself, the
lyric figure of the music maker, the body shaker, that drives neo-cons and
old-cons to the FCC and ratings boards with a quickness. Buff, deeply brown,
and lyrically fearless, 50 Cent is not so much as terrifying in his
gangsterism as he is threatening to the ideal of untainted Americana. Fi'ty
embodies the pull yourself up by the bootstraps mythology unflinchingly
paired with the marketing chutzpah of a Fortune 500 mogul, leaving the
mainstream to ask why he has to be so bold with it, so uncompromisingly
defiant, as he and his minions floss the trappings of wealth and leisure,
boisterously laying claim to the bounteous “booty” of drugs, women, guns,
and rims.
In the
hands of Jim Sheridan, director of My Left Foot, In The
Name of The Father, and In America, the hotly
protested, recently released Get Rich or Die Tryin’ is
more than just another gangstah vanity vehicle. Sheridan, who spurred
Daniel Day-Lewis to an Academy Award for Best actor in 1989, has staged an
often times dazzling homecoming for Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent.
We are familiar with the story: black
boy, hard streets, single mother. But Fi’ty, as the young Marcus Jackson,
played with a sweetness and charm of his own by Marc John Jeffries, aka
Isaiah of Losing Isaiah, has an idyllic life in many ways. He
is immersed in a community that is defined by a loving grandmother, Viola
Davis of Antwone Fischer, a ragtag group of friends, a
childhood sweetheart who later blooms into a full love interest, (the lithe
and lovely Joy Bryant), and a grandfather, (veteran actor Sullivan Walker),
whose West Indian lilt is shorthand for a steadfast, loving male figure in
Marcus’s life.
He also has a mother like no other in
recent film. Serena Walters, as Fi’ty’s drug slinging moms, Katrina, is no
downtrodden stereotype of noble suffering. If there is a smidgen of truth
in the screen depiction, Katrina Jackson was not afraid to go out and get
hers. Fi’ty Cent has alluded to family ties to a Jamaica, Queens drug
dynasty, and if it began with this fearless lady, then Fi’ty’s drive and
daring are his birthright.
Jim Sheridan is a master at shooting
strong characters who are in some way marked by longing. Marcus’s young
life is shaped by the absence of a father. This emotional abyss deepens
when street-savvy, Oedipally beautiful Katrina is violently murdered. With
the mother gone and aging grandparents struggling to raise other
children-in-crisis in a cramped Queens home, Marcus, burgeoning into a
rapping young Caesar, has no choice but to take up the family business,
whose creed passed on by brutal drug lord Majestic, Adewale Agbaje, who may
or may not be his unnamed progenitor is, “Show no love. Love will get you
killed.”
In Get Rich the bustling
drug corners are ready to erupt and the dance floor on a Saturday night is a
potential killing ground. The Columbians are bitter rivals to the kingdom
that had been erected under the reign of Katrina and a shrewd, politically
connected kingpin, Levar, the incomparable Bill Duke. Duke as an endangered
drug monarch who is another possible father to Marcus, and Terrence Howard
as Marcus’s trigger-happy back-up, Bama, lend weight to a cast that is sure
under Sheridan’s direction.
Fi’ty himself is surprisingly easy in front of
the camera. There is an awkward moment when in the middle of a particularly
tense hold-up scene, Marcus winks at a Columbian boy who is being held under
the sights of Bama’s gun. You can almost hear the publicist in the
background demanding that the audience be reassured that Fi’ty would not be
a party to shooting a civilian, particularly not a member of the hip-hop mad
demographic. But the story, and a lush script written by Brooklyn born
Terence Winter, who has written for The Sopranos, do the work of
establishing the humanity of a young man who is not a monster but a
reflection of the ambiguities, the heartaches, and the fears of any of us
who are bold enough to step into life with the ferocity of a 50 Cent.
Sheridan lights scenes into portraiture—there is a definite affinity for the
skin tones, the verbal cues, and the visual markers of this particular
corner of African-American culture that pop under the director’s camera.
Sheridan is a lover of mysticism, delighting and despairing over the
potential for magic in scenes of birth, rebirth and death. Magical-realism
in such moments as Fi’ty’s infamous shooting is necessary and natural,
because the story here is not only the traditional journey of the artist as
a young man. The story of Marcus Jackson is the journey of every
marginalized American sprung from the rubble of American imagination,
cultivated under its harsh judgments and hard realities, but still raw and
brash enough to swagger out of the darkness and into the limelight.
