
William Bermudez and Sam Friedman’s Grassland is a gritty and timely social justice play: it doesn’t shy away from addressing the shortcomings of the criminal justice system in the United States. It also raises the issue of racial disparity in jailing people for minor marijuana offenses but does so through the personal story of a Latina woman who grows and sells marijuana for the welfare of her young child.
Parents teaching their children how to fucking survive. Co-written by the directors David Goldblum and Adam Edery, the producers of the film The Grassland’s action starts with Leo, a charming young Latino boy (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) living in a New Jersey household with miserable conditions, together with his mother, Sofia (Mia Maestro), who grows and sells marijuana. To spare him from the surrounding “business,” her friend Brandon (Quincy Isaiah) looks after Leo.
Sofia notices that Brandon can relate to the younger Black male clients and wants him to be her messenger. He pushes her away from the offer and gives reasons for how he can end up in jail if things are somehow in the wrong order. It is very heart-wrenching when Brandon is on screen. He is a young man with a shoplifting charge, a mistake of his youth, who struggles to get employment. There is a tenderness and sweetness about Brandon because his loyalty to Sofia and Leo makes him part of the family, which makes the audience cheer for him. Quite obviously, Brandon’s character is constructed to highlight racial injustice surrounding drug charges among the colored communities. Isaiah does this well, bringing a sense of realism to the character, as a person who has been incarcerated and is now expected to search for a job, but faces the reality that employers are not interested in hiring such individuals because they ascribe to them other visions.
A new danger comes when John (Jeff Kober), Sofia and Leo’s neighbor’s grandson, and his grandmother Julie (Sean Convery) come to stay downstairs. Sofia is already scared from the very fact that the child’s grandfather is a policeman when Leo finally seemed thrilled to meet someone his age, but the grandfather had a police cruiser, which startled Sofia even more.
Jeff Kober returns to the viewers in another remarkable role in Grassland as the most underrated character actor of the film. The moment he is introduced, Kober makes the peaceful atmosphere uneasy and keeps the characters and the audience on their toes. It appears as though John is a lonely figure who yearns for interaction with other people. After the secret is revealed as to why he is the sole figure acting as his grandson’s caretaker, he becomes more than just a shadow while his bond with Sofia, Leo, and Brandon changes their destiny entirely. Kober manages to bring to life a character that carries so much weight but stops him from becoming a cliche. He puts himself in the shoes of an aging man in the sunset of his profession and in the twilight of his narrow-minded worldview. Kober does not play false anywhere. This is a good collaboration by a good actor.
There are some moments Maestro and Cabot-Conyers share which are beautiful since both actors understand the hardships of being single mothers and how close those hardships can make them. To him, his mom is everything. And although what Sofia does is illegal, she means to sell her last shipment and be done with it. A mother trying to get by during the Great Recession of 08, all she wishes is the best for her young son. Maestro does a fantastic job showing a tender-hearted woman who has a rather skewed perception of the impact of her work.
Cabot-Conyers is also great, portraying Leo as a kid with lots of gentle curiosity who does look like he’s acting. This young man ought to have a very good run.
The final act may suffer from a bit of melodrama, but the directors manage to pull it off thanks to their dedication to building such complex characters. The screenplay is rooted in reality and the film is well cast, so the viewers are able to identify with this cast of flawed people who have just about had enough of trying to fit in somewhere. What happens in the end is very powerful and explains the ramifications of the system’s failure and how it fails everyone.
William Bermudez and Sam Friedman took inspiration from their own lives for Grassland. Friedman talks about how as a teenager, his mother took up marijuana cultivation in her own bedroom. Because of this, Friedman goes on to say, his “suburban normalcy” got disrupted; his peers were restricted from visiting his home and the adolescent grew to dislike what his mother was engaging herself in. Bermudez is an immigrant. His father immigrated to the US at a young age from Argentina and had to lose where he came from and everything that encompassed it to grow up in an alien land.
According to Friedman’s account, “Our film is based on these lived experiences and focuses on how the racial, cultural, economic and gendered family distinctions show the prejudices that elevate and legitimize whiteness, male dominance and wealth as normality in the American society. Through Leo, his mother in the story lets the audience witness the injustice she has to bear.”
First, the empathy and the understanding through Lowe’s head begin to make sense. The directors utilize Grassland to Troubate the justice system screw. American justice system refers to sometimes placement of courts ‘low level’ Marijuana-related charges as such until the one charged originates from a black American or Latino community. Despite the fact that it has already become (to a degree) legal, several thousand, the majority of whom are colored continue to serve time for substance-related crimes. This race-based double standard damages societies and the basis for lives to spin out of control.
Further, as described in the Film’s press statement, directing heads employed crew members who had first-hand experience with the system during the time directors invited them for work, offering them chances where justice had let them down. Such chances were offered in terms of “the workforce that included ex-convicts and the consulting producers who endured the legal system’.
It is this zealous commitment to realism that makes their film so powerful and disturbing.
Grass has made it clear how important it is to fight for justice for those minorities who are victims of this country’s unjust and polarized drug policies. Through great artistry, William Bermudez and Sam Friedman focus on how many admirable individuals and families are crushed by the power of oppressive injustice. It is a great film and an important one.
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