As a tribute to John Singleton, the gifted filmmaker
who died Monday at the ridiculously young age of 51, I offer my original 1997 review
of his “Rosewood.”
Given the facts that inspired the makers
of Rosewood, it shouldn't be
surprising that so much of the movie, for good or ill, has the look and feel of
fiction.
During the first week of January 1923,
the residents of Rosewood, a predominantly black settlement in Central Florida,
were savagely attacked by angry whites from the nearby mill town of Sumner.
Until then, the people of both areas had co-existed in relative harmony.
Indeed, many of them knew each other, had done business with one another. But
this familiarity did little to diminish the bloodlust of the Sumner mob once a
white woman announced that she had been assaulted by a black man. Over a period
of four days, many black men and women were shot, lynched or burned alive in
and around Rosewood. The exact number of the victims remains a subject of
historical dispute — estimates range as high as 250. The survivors fled into
the swamps to escape certain death, leaving behind all their worldly
possessions. They never returned. Rosewood was wiped off the map. In effect,
the mob from Sumner murdered the entire town.
The history and destruction of Rosewood
remained unknown to the rest of the world for more than six decades. Survivors
rarely talked of the tragedy outside of their immediate families. At first,
their silence could be attributed to fears of reprisal. (After all, the folks
of Sumner were alive and well and, quite possibly, ready to return to their
vigilante ways.) As time went by, however, it became obvious to the descendants
of those who had escaped Rosewood that the survivors were too traumatized —
and, perhaps, too ashamed — to say anything of what had happened.
By the time a tenacious reporter for the
St. Petersburg Times began to piece together the story of Rosewood in 1982,
most of the survivors had died, and those who remained alive were reluctant to
talk. Eventually, journalist Gary Moore — no relation, presumably, to the TV
variety show host of yesteryear — tracked down about 20 survivors and their
descendants. From their accounts, he fashioned a story that attracted the interest
of producers from TV’s 60 Minutes.
The resultant publicity fueled the efforts of Arnette Doctor, the son of a
Rosewood survivor, to demand reparations for the survivors and their families. Finally,
in 1994, the Florida state legislature passed a bill providing for payments to
the Rosewood survivors. By that time, inevitably, Hollywood had begun to take
notice. Producer Jon Peters acquired the rights to the story, beginning the
process that has led to the release of Rosewood.
Unfortunately, by now there is very
little first-hand information about what happened in the Florida town more than
70 years ago. Director John Singleton, the immensely talented young filmmaker
who made his first impression with Boyz N
the Hood, and screenwriter Gregory Poirier spoke to a few survivors and
their relatives. For the most part, however, they were forced to extrapolate
from oral histories and local legends. Clearly, the filmmakers have based many
of their speculations on other accounts of racial tensions in Central Florida
during the 1920s. Just as clearly, they also have tossed a healthy dose of
Hollywood hokum into the mix.
Surprisingly enough, the mix jells into
something truly substantial. Rosewood
is such a cunningly constructed and emotionally overwhelming piece of work
that, even when it veers off into Wild West clichés and Saturday matinee
heroics, the drama remains powerful and persuasive. Singleton and Poirier take
care to sprinkle a few complex characters among the familiar archetypes, and
ground the entire story in reality by vividly evoking the specifics of time,
place and attitudes. This may not be precisely how things happened in real
life. But Rosewood is more than convincing
enough to help us accept the more fanciful touches of dramatic license.
Mann, the most brazenly stereotypical of
the lead characters, is also, according to the film’s production notes, the
only character Poirier invented entirely out of whole cloth. Played with
taciturn dignity and hulking authority by Ving Rhames, Mann comes across as a
classic gunfighter hero — eager to settle down, reluctant to involve himself in
scrapes, lethally efficient when push comes to shove. The big differences is,
he’s African-American. More precisely, he’s a black World War I veteran who
rides into Rosewood on a handsome horse, and is greatly impressed by a place
the locals describe as “heaven on earth” for black people.
Rosewood is indeed usual for its time,
being a town where most of the residents are black, and many of them are, by
standards of the era, prosperous. One of the few white citizens, John Wright
(Jon Voight), is a store owner who actually treats his black neighbors with
respect. Whether he does this only because it’s good for business isn't
initially clear. In any case, Wright has managed to earn the wary admiration of
Sarah Carrier (Esther Rolle), a family matriarch who doesn't always speak
highly of her fair-skinned neighbors. Mr. Wright, she tells Mann, “is a
half-way decent white man — if there ever was such a thing.”
For a long time, Mann functions
primarily as a plot device, serving as the audience’s surrogate while he is
introduced to the major residents of Rosewood. In addition to John Wright and
Sarah Carrier, the notables include Sylvester Carrier (Don Cheadle), Sarah’s
son, a proud piano teacher who defiantly insists on treating white men as his
equals; and Scrappie (Elise Neal), a 17-year-old schoolteacher who makes Mann
think seriously about giving up his wandering ways. Rosewood takes ample time to let us know these people, to
appreciate the simple pleasures and satisfactions of their everyday lives,
before Singleton and Poirier ignite the nightmare. The slatternly white women
who claims she was attacked by a black man — possibly an escaped convict — is a
liar. (The audience sees her being assaulted by her brutal white lover.) More
important, just about everyone in Sumner, even her husband, suspects she is
lying. But that doesn't stop the rumors from spreading or the anger from
blazing.
Rosewood makes
it very clear that virulent racism isn't the only thing feeding the mob’s
bloodlust. Most of the white folks in Sumner are depicted as low-income
rednecks who bitterly resent the apparent prosperity of “those niggers” in
Rosewood. In one telling scene, a sneering redneck wonders aloud why Sylvester
Carrier can afford a piano while he, a white man, can’t. A friend points out
that the redneck doesn’t even know how to play the piano. But that information
is brushed aside as insignificant. It’s the principle that matters.
When the full fury of the hate-filled
mob begins to hammer down on Rosewood, the spectacle is at once horrifying
senseless and painfully familiar. By sheer coincidence, I saw Rosewood at the recent Berlin Film
Festival, just a few hours after seeing Calling the Ghosts, a documentary about Croat and Muslim women who were raped and
beaten by their Serbian captors during the Bosnian civil war. These women, like
most of the other prisoners in their internment camp, had lived for years
alongside their Serbian neighbors, and had assumed these people were their
friends. Just like the black townspeople in Rosewood thought they knew, and
were known by, the good folks of Sumner.
Late in Rosewood, there is a scene where the white mob dumps dozens of
black corpses into a massive grave. Once again, the scene was all the more
chilling for me because I viewed it in the context of a film festival where
ample evidence of man’s inhumanity to man abounded. I couldn't help thinking of
other things I had seen in Berlin — documentaries and dramatic films about
wartime horrors and, even more joltingly, an exhibition at The Topography of Terror,
a museum on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters, that showed Nazis
disposing of their many victims in a fashion very similar to that of the
racists thugs in Rosewood. Hate is a
virus. It takes different forms, but the symptoms never seem to change very
much.
With all that fresh in my mind, I may
have been more willing than most moviegoers to forgive the makers of Rosewood for wanting to show heroism and
self-empowerment as well as evil and destruction — for wanting to provide some
glimmer of hope in something like a happy ending. The movie is tremendously
effective as a large-scale reconstruction of terrible historical events that
should never be forgotten. On the other hand, Rosewood also gives us in Mann and John Wright two characters who
transcend their differences, and their own mutual suspicions, to save as many
lives as possible. (Voight is exceptionally good at illuminating Wright's moral
complexities.)
To say more would risk
spoiling the impact of the movie’s pulse-pounding climax. Suffice it to say
that, by embellishing the known facts with a few romanticized flourishes,
Singleton and Poirier have struck a fair balance between their responsibility
to historical truth and their desire to entertain — and, yes, inspire —
audiences.
