“Rob Peace,” which is premiering at the film festival, is however a type of picture that filmmakers determine is not worth making these days and perhaps quite too often.
The titular character, portrayed by Jay Will with the intense brain and magnetism of a young Denzel Washington, was a science-obsessed child who lived in East Orange a city adjacent to Newark. Rob’s father was a drug dealer and his mother took three jobs to send him to a private monastic school. Eventually, he attended biochemistry courses at Yale University and possibly would have reshaped the world of science if tragic aspects of his life had not ruined it: his father Skeet got imprisoned for murdering two women with a pistol. The case had some strange prosecutorial features that looked like overshadowing interference by the police (one, the murder weapon that had been entered into evidence did not belong to Skeet), and despite convincing himself that Rob was feeling fatherly guilt, he tried to help his father, which depicted a miracle of faith in a man.
“Rob Peace” draws inspiration from the works of Black New Wave filmmakers in the 80s and 90s, which included low-budget films that told the real-life struggles of the working poor. There would be no film drama in the world without Chiwetel Ejiofor. He was the director and he based the film on the biography of Jeff Hobbs, who was acquainted with the main character. He also acts the character Skeet, a wild and warm-hearted man who adores his son but is also deeply flawed in many ways.
Did Skeet perpetrate the two murders? He insists he did not, and many residents there believe him, and he had never been arrested for anything prior to the murders. Rob’s close family Mary J. Blige, who is as good as an actress as she is as a musical performer, will never be convinced about Jackie Peace’s innocence although Jackie Peace’s mother has refused to discuss aspects of her husband’s life that would have allowed her son the joy felt by every other son – that of an idolized father. The relationship between Rob and his father who is behind bars is the central theme here.
However, that is not the only aspect that Ejiofor has put emphasis on. In this adaptation, there is much, and I mean much which is both sweet and sour. It can even be interesting to think how the announcement was controlled and its artistic level. There is also a role of compactness, getting to the point of every scene as quickly as possible for pacing and rhythm’s sake, and a role of embellishment, trying to make every moment do more than just one or even two things.
“Rob Peace” does not only depict various things but also reveals a selfless individual whose talents are channeled toward helping others who lack such gifts. His father is perhaps the best example. It’s interesting to see how he goes from being so emotional over the fact that his son is helping him, to feeling like it’s his son’s duty and then resting assured that the son will feel guilty if he doesn’t serve him day and night. But Rob also serves as an example of what can be accomplished by neighbors, teachers, and college and high school classmates (he has this unique ability to bring people of a lot of voluntary demographics to come together to have a good time). There’s even a subplot where he and a couple of his buddies figure out that there is a profit to be made in buying and ‘flipping’ houses, which at the beginning of the millennium began taking place in East Orange and Newark as well, thanks to the gentrification that was active in these neighborhoods. Rob can envision where the opportunities are, but he can also see the avenues to realize those opportunities. It becomes clear that the latter was the result of the training that assisted him in seeing the former.
This notion can also be seen in its smaller details, like that time when Jackie and Rob are discussing their finances, and without thinking about it, she asks him to do the calculations.
“Rob Peace” is a curiously ambitious and unfortunate film that tries to tell an eventful life and all that comes with it in two hours; three could have sufficed too, or perhaps it could have been planned as a miniseries. Some elements feel like they have been cut short or brushed over. That’s the nature of the project, again another unfortunate fate, perhaps. (Oldies definitely had a hard time making their biography of a person’s life seem fascinating if they focused on the man as an oldie rather than on the former little child who would create in the audience endless hope: about 20 minutes on the baby’s life, then screaming for 3-4 changes of ages, the remaining endurance, and closeness left to the actual conclusion that practically everyone had seen and convulsed from boredom.)
“Rob Peace” is stylized in another oddly out-of-sync way: it is populist. It’s also quite unfortunate that such films do not find a place in current theatrical paradigms unless perhaps they include the artistry of Will Smith, which in itself is a gamble, as it would look as if everyone knew how the film was shot from the marketing standpoint. Ejiofor’s direction, along with the editing of Masahiro Hirakubo, does not exclude the presence of jokes, crying and screaming, or even conspiring remarks from the audience.
Rob experiences moments of being knocked down, rising from struggle, committing what could be looked at as a stupid mistake at his point in time, only to be reminded that he is human. It almost makes you wish you could just be there in a packed theater, seeing the material on screen and feeling the on-screen emotions in unison with others at the very core of your being.
But the angle that this film presents that I consider the best is that if a character has a certain view about something and you disagree, you are not watching the film ‘wrong’. In fact “Rob Peace” does not hold back in suggesting that you will watch this film and feel as though you have seen something very unique and that life is not something that can be boxed in, so how could anyone’s life be contained in several boxes, unlike the movies?
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