Is there a man in the 'hood?

>> John Singleton dissects the black male in Baby Boy

by MATTHEW HAYS

A voiceover opens John Singleton's latest film, Baby Boy, recounting a theory. The African-American male, the voice tells us, is believed by some psychologists to be stuck in an arrested stage of development. In essence, their inability to form lasting relationships and to take on responsibility (i.e. children) stems directly from their inability to ever feel truly grown up.

It's a promising beginning, seeing as Singleton has produced some occasionally thoughtful films about the black experience (Boyz N the Hood, a film many consider a landmark but one I thought to be overrated, and Rosewood, a film no one saw but I thought was excellent). Baby Boy revolves around one lost young man, the 20-year-old Tyrese Gibson, who still lives with his mother, has two children by two different women and no job prospects.

Instead of offering us insight into the African-American experience, however, Singleton offers up a series of unlikable, unsympathetic characters, wrapping them up in an ineffectual, preachy sermon about what a black man should do to be a man.

If only, Singleton appears to be saying, the dear lad Gibson would settle down with one of his girlfriends and accept his role as provider and father. Ringing a bit hollow with its echoes of a family-values lecture, the film is even more disconcerting in its pretense as a condemnation of violence.

One of the more interesting elements of the film is a bit of flashforwarding, in which Gibson, whose brother, we learn, died earlier in gang-related violence, imagines his own potential demise. Many black men in America, Singleton suggests through his central character, take dying a violent, premature death as a given.

But any anti-violence message that may exist in the film is completely undermined and contradicted by the other violent acts that occur. In one sequence, Gibson and his buddy take revenge on a group of youngsters who stole Gibson's bike in an earlier scene. Singleton thoughtlessly plays the scene of humiliating violence for laughs.

Also rather unsettlingly, Baby Boy arrives at its conclusion (and I know I risk giving too much away here) through an act of fairly senseless violence. If anything, the filmmaker has--albeit inadvertently--created a film which reconfirms a misguided investment in violent acts.

Baby Boy is now playing