“Rob Peace”, which is based on real events, is a type of film that is rarely made these days.
The focal character, portrayed by Jay Will duplicating the wide-eyed charisma of a teenage Denzel Washington in his prime, was raised in East Orange, New Jersey, and although he was a young man fixated on science, Rob’s life was filled with hardships. Rob’s father was a drug dealer, and his mom was dedicated to working three jobs to send him to a private school run by Benedictine Monks.
He then enrolled at Yale University to pursue a major in biochemistry and possibly turn out as one of the great scientists in the world had it not been for the unfortunate reality of his father Skeet getting locked up for the murder of two women with a gun, he had previously owned. Skeet’s case seemed strikingly strange and even gave a hint of some police misconduct (to cite but one instance, the murder weapon exhibited in court proceedings was not even in Skeet’s possession when he was arrested), and despite Rob having outer insecurities that his dad still might in fact be guilty, he was resolute indeed to attain his freedom. Over many proceedings in the courts, he even had to turn some of his brains of science into something vile like growing and marketing “designer weed” only to manage his father’s defence in court.
“Rob Peace” serves as a tribute to the “Black New Wave” movies in the 80s and the 90s, mostly being made on a shoestring budget and attempting to portray the lives of real people from the working or struggling classes. Chiwetel Ejiofor is the actor who made this movie possible. He both directed the film and wrote its script, which was based on a true story by Jeff Hobbs, who was friends with the main character. Seth, a father who adores his child yet is deeply limited and harmed in various ways, is also portrayed by him.
Did Skeet actually perpetrate two homicides? He insists he did not, and many people in the area are sure that he did not, and he had never been in conflict with the law prior to being detained on suspicion of murder. Jackie, Rob’s adored mother (Mary J. Blige must be acknowledged as a brilliant actress in addition to being a great singer), does not say anything of the kind, claiming only that, in order for Rob to remain blissfully ignorant like millions of boys who look up to their fathers, she suppressed some of the less attractive facts about Skeet’s biography. The relationship between Rob and his convicted father is the heart of the film.
However, it is not the only aspect that Ejiofor looks to. Most definitely, and I stress, definitely, a lot is going on in this adaptation, in positive and negative aspects. In this context, evaluating the screenwriting and directing is particularly interesting, even for the craftsman. At the same time, there is compression (the audience has to get in the scene then out of it as swiftly as possible) but then also expanse (how one has to construct a scene in order to not reach a single purpose but several: reveal characters or let them develop, put pieces of the jigsaw puzzle around the place, comment the real life outside this one real story).
The book Rob Peace portrays the life of a remarkable man, a hardworking son whose considerable talent is put to good use by those less fortunate. His father is the primary example. Observe how he progresses from being emotionally thankful for the assistance of his son to developing a sense of entitlement over the son and even making the son feel bad for not giving up every second of his life to his father. But Rob is also an example of what can be attained to his neighbors and teachers, or high school and college classmates, which he won’t have a problem to gather them around the same place to party.
There is even a subplot about Rob and some of his friends noticing an opportunity to make a profit out of re buying and reselling houses due to the growing gentrification processes that had started changing urban towns like East Orange and Newark in the early 2000s. He has the vision, and he also has the ambition necessary to carry out the plan. But as time passes, it becomes clear that these skills were what allowed him to develop his vision.
Suchsa idea can also be seen during small incidents, such as the budgeting talk Jackie and Rob had where she hunched and let him calculate.
Overall, “Rob Peace” is a grandia movie, probably overambitious a film in the sense it tries to encase an eventful life and everything around it into two hours, a feature that can easily be expanded to three hours or recast as a miniseries. A few pieces are bound to feel short or glossed over. But that’s the character of this kind of undertaking—another tragic inevitability, perhaps. (In the past, such bios would get away portraying the highlights of a person’s life, starting with the childhood, three-fourteen completely distinct parts of their existence and finally some painless short years to cover the rest of the life. People would have watched the entire movie and never felt that their expectations were set off balance).
So ‘Rob Peace’ in each narrows the level of expectation, it also sounds out of step for the filmmaker: the target of the film sounds mainstream. The saddest thing in these days, such a film will never be distributed on mainstream theatrical release (unless he is Will Smith—which even then is rolling the iron dice) considering the impressions the director and the producer intended the people to feel. Ejiofor’s manner of directing and his collaboration with Masahiro Hirakubo’s editing lets a life where a reaction, either a laugh, tear, gasp, or even char — remain.
There are times when we experience Rob getting defeated, overcoming, and making a blunder even though he does not know at the given moment, and it’s that moment where you are able to understand how the audience would appreciate the story if it was in a packed theater.
The thing I like the most in relation to this movie is that it does not baby you and state that if one character has a particular view and you have a different one then you are “watching it wrong”. There is telling in the movie that ‘Rob Peace’ struggles to try to make the audience think that they have watched a film that has only one plot, which is not the case for any when is their image.
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