This is a review for the film Rosewood that I wrote for school a while back. Warning: contains some spoilers.
As I watched this movie, I was, for some odd reason, reminded of the 1971 classic “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.” Maybe it was because I knew that the director’s next film was a remake of “Shaft,” and I was looking for some explanation within the film, but I’m not sure. The only thing that truly reminded me of it was the ending where the number of dead differed from the official Florida body count, most likely by white men, and the witnesses, black men and women. For some reason that rang out as one of those statements that you would see at the end of a blaxploitation film or a Spike Lee joint, which isn’t particularly a bad thing.
John Singleton’s (Boyz n the hood, Shaft) fourth and last film that was any good examines the Rosewood massacres with a fictional story line, allowing him more flexibility with the subject matter. But it tells more than that, it also shows how racism was bred in the mind of children, how mob mentality works, what fear is. Early in the film a father sees his son playing with a black child. He forbids him from paling around with him. Later he will take the boy out lynching with him, show him a mass grave that contains men, women, and children, and teach him how to make a noose.
We start the film in the peaceful town of Rosewood, Florida, a town mostly populated by blacks. There are a few white families living in the mist of them, one of the more important to the story being a kind store keeper who’s having an affair with one of his black neighbors. The blacks run their own businesses on land that they own, prompting the poor white men of the neighboring town to be resentful of them.(“Why does that nigger have a piano when I don’t?” one man asks; he’s offended on principle, for he can’t even play the piano.)
Early on in the film a mysterious, though entirely fictional, man by the name of Mann (Ving Rhames) (a reversal reference to blaxploitation film?) is introduced to us. He rides in on a horse and has a lot of money, which he uses to try to buy land in an auction against the shopkeeper, which ends up being more a white against black fight. (He first bids, and the whole room turns to look at him. The auctioneer asks him if he knows how much he said that he would pay; he replies yes. When he bids more than the shopkeeper wants to, a man next to him turns to him and says, “Come on, are ya gonna let a nigger beat you?” The race battle continues and grows increasingly heated.)
We learn that a black convict has just escaped from a chain gang. Since Mann has just arrived out of nowhere, the first guess would be him, but it is almost certainly not. A woman claims that she was beaten, “but not raped,” by a black man that she didn’t know. We know that this story is false, we see that it was her lover, two black women that work for her also know the truth, though they say nothing.
This event causes the whites in the neighboring area to form a lynching mob in look for the man who raped, gossip has now turned the story to rape, and beat the girl. The sheriff (Michael Rooker) tries to keep the mob under control and then tries to convince the blacks to leave for a while, though both ideas fail. Sylvester Carrier (Don Cheadle) realizes, though he refuses to leave, the danger that the mob represents after he and Mann find a man lynched, and buys ammunition for his gun to protect his family. Mann also sees danger and leaves, though he returns soon to lead a group of women and children to safety.
Ving Rhames was not the first choice for the role of Mann. (They wanted a more “positive” black he says) but he gets a great performance that is essential to the film. In the film he has an element of mystery and unfamiliarity that is rather effective.
Singleton’s debut feature, Boyz n the Hood, was an important, fantastic film that steered clear of the clichés and corniness that Rosewood steers directly into, while this was merely good. The ending was one of those which made me dislike the film. A character thought dead is actually alive, everyone is saved, the boy whose dad tried to teach him racism leaves him saying that he is not a real man, the shopkeepers children finally call his second wife mom for the first time, et cetera. It was a typical “Hollywood” cliché ending that I was hoping wouldn’t be there. Despite the ending I still think that the film was good and worth seeing.
