Chiwetel Ejiofor’s next directing job provocatively deals with the right themes.
In “Rob Peace,” his first directorial position since “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” Chiwetel Ejiofor expresses some African-American themes between the 80s and 2000s, and based it on the biography “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace.” It was a short life for the young man, who went to Yale University and fell back to the streets drug dealing, until his death at the age of 30.
And like Ejiofor’s directorial debut, this movie allows the “12 Years a Slave” actor to act and balance a story about science and harsh environments. But he doesn’t take full credit of the movie, because newcomer Jay Will plays the title character with the right tone and convictions.
Rob is a Newark kid with a drug dealing and wrongfully convicted father Skeet Douglas and a hardworking single mother Jackie Peace (Mary J. Blige), and a chance to become an Ivy League student.
As the film begins, Rob temporally gets his father out of jail, but is unlucky in the end, but, at the very least, he has the smarts to get himself accepted into Yale. And he’s open to getting a PhD and maybe starting his own lab one day. That is if circumstances don’t get in the way.
Rob knows his father was set up by the police, in terms of the murder weapon and the death of the one who could have testified against him. But it also becomes complicated when the case could get expensive and when the old man gets diagnosed with brain cancer, and he resorts to drug dealing to help develop a new medicine. But the real question he asks himself is: if whatever he does for his father is worth the risk.
The cast also includes Camilla Cabello as another Yale student named Naya, who becomes his girlfriend, Mare Winningham as his biology professor Durham, who is impressed with his versatility as a Freshman, Juan Castano as another Yale student named Oswaldo, who makes ends meet as a drug dealer, and Michael Kelly as a religious schoolmaster Edwin Leahy, whom the young man works for as a science teacher.
The rest of the film shows us Rob trying forget the harsh realities of his youth and better himself and his community, while thinking about whether or not his father was innocent of murdering two girls. It’s mostly a film about how the past can affect a person’s future, and how he deals with it.
I saw “Rob Peace” virtually from the Sundance Film Festival last January, and I was given another look recently, so I can remind myself about why I liked this movie. The screenplay has its setbacks from time to time, regarding some conflicts, but it also has strong and emotional performances that reflect on the pathos. The best come from Will, Ejiofor, and Blige, who are all written with complexity and truth. And they all express the right themes, regarding racism, careers, behaviors, and futures.
The better African-American themed movie is “Sing Sing,” which used Colman Domingo and a group of real former convicts being embraced by the power of acting in the most difficult circumstances. It’s still expanding throughout this month, which is understandable why a majority of you readers haven’t seen it yet. But “Rob Peace” is also a good choice in the meantime.
It really does represent the short and tragic life of this young man.