Monday, Jan. 19, 2009

'Notorious' doesn't quite measure up

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

Biopics have the odd distinction of being simultaneously empowering and utterly demoralizing.

As movies about extraordinary people, they make you feel like you can accomplish anything. Rapper Biggie Smalls may have started off as a drug-slinging scumbag, but by his early 20s, he was a beloved artist with millions of fans and dollars who was sleeping with other respected artists! Then by his mid-20s, he achieved the immortal feat of being shot to death! It's like a lifetime of achievement compressed into a decade of normal-time. If Biggie did that, coming where he came from, then anyone can do anything.

Then again, by my early 20s I was spending my time wondering what store mannequins look like under their fancy clothes, and in my mid-20s I'm running out of mannequin space in my closet while remaining painfully alive, a state of affairs in which I can only dream of someday being important enough to warrant being gunned down by jealous foes. It's enough to make a person want to gun himself down if not for the knowledge no one important (i.e. audiences everywhere) would care.

In Notorious, one of hip-hop's most charismatic men started life as a geeky momma's boy. The first time he met his dad -- a married loser mom Angela Bassett wants nothing to do with -- the kid who would become Biggie is so disillusioned he throws himself into the drug game.

Years later, Jamal Woolard (playing Biggie) is leading a double life, a good kid to Bassett and a tough kid to everyone else. When she discovers he's slinging, she kicks him out, leading him to step up his game and swiftly get arrested for it.

The upside to jail is Woolard has all the free time he needs to work on the rhyming he's been fascinated by his whole life. Once he's back on the street, his flow catches the ear of a man with connections to the record industry, who introduces Woolard to a producer--a producer named Puff Daddy.

Biopics have a tough time of it. Not only do we already know the ending, but they also have to tell a life story, and the thing about lives is they rarely make a whole lot of sense. Unless the teller imposes a narrative structure over it -- and that runs its own risks, like crossing over into the realm of complete damn falsehoods -- a man's life can end up looking like no more than a meaningless sequence of events.

You hear that, ghost of Biggie Smalls? I said your life was meaningless! Actually, Notorious makes an effort to understand Smalls' life, it just doesn't seem to penetrate that deep into his motivations: My dad is terrible, so that makes me angry! My mom kicked me out, so now I'm gonna deal the hell out of these drugs! I'm having a kid, so now I need more money, and the inevitable problems that accompany that money! I don't know why I yelled on that last one, I'm just sort of on a roll here!

These events and many like them are helpfully narrated by a script that, for as highly as it thinks of its subject, doesn't seem nearly as smart as he was. I didn't know the man. Right now, I'm doing some pretty heavy conjecturing. But Smalls' lyrics show piercing self-awareness and a cunning sense of irony, the words of one of the smartest dudes in the history of rap; the Smalls of Notorious is just some friendly guy who's good at charming women into bed.

That willingness to lay out his weaknesses is one of the movie's strengths -- it may be firmly on his side, but it doesn't pretend he's above fault. Between this and charismatic performances from Woolard, Naturi Naughton as Lil Kim, and Derek Luke as Puffy, it's possible, at times, to see these superstars as real people.

But as soon as these people start to speak for themselves, the significance of what they're going through is swept aside by a tide of narrative summary that hustles us right off to the next Key Moment. Though Biggie's life was short, Notorious feels rushed. It's never outright bad -- just persistently underwhelming.

Grade: C+