Review: Get Rich or Die Tryin'

Back in the studio era, recording stars routinely made movies, and actors and actresses often recorded records. Everything was vertically integrated, so it made sense to use cult of personality to move as many different types of units as possible. That changed for awhile, as the studio system crumbled, and the 70s renaissance of American film coincided with a bleak overall period for American popular culture.  But now it seems like things are coming full circle. Gwen Stefani doesn't make a near-mute appearance in The Aviator because anyone imagines that she's got an acting talent that needs to be shared with the world – she takes the role of Jean Harlow, which probably could and should have been larger, because it cements her status as a Great Blonde, which is in itself a fab commercial for her solo record and fashion line. And ordinarily, no one would expect Get Rich or Die Tryin', otherwise known as The 50 Cent Movie, to be anything more than a 2-hour commercial for that rapper and his very specific, bullet-riddled mythology. 50 might go on to play characters not based on himself, in other films or TV shows that are not based on his life, but I sort of doubt it. More than likely, that's not really the point here. I don't think Die Tryin' wants to be a memorable moment in moviegoing; I'm fairly sure that it will settle for being a successful moment in marketing, and anything else is gravy.

But then why did they need Jim Sheridan – a six-time Oscar nominee for In the Name of the Father and In America, and other films about Irish people – to direct it?

Less a hip hop film than a mafia flick imbued wiith the narrative depth of a late-80s video game, Get Rich or Die Tryin' is over-long and under felt, but it's no Cool as Ice. It's also no 8 Mile, and that's a problem. The pairing of director and star is, as has been much commented opon, both curious and not totally without a kind of logic. Sheridan's films are generally gritty and serious, and though the film's press notes stress that the Irishman "has long been a fan of rap and the culture surrounding it", he lacks the indulgent taste for pop pacing that seems to be chameleonic Mile director Curtis Hanson's one dependable auteurist trait. One imagines this looked something like a novelty project for Sheridan, but it's not clear from what we see on screen that he's having any fun. A quick glance at his resume shows that he's more than qualified to make a movie about poor people trying to fight their way through the cinderblock of social strata by any means necessary;  to put it bluntly, in terms of Sheridan's filmography, there's not much new here beyond the skin color of his protagonists. But though Sheridan's very obviously excited by black culture's aesthetic possibilities (the gray horizons of Jamaica Beach punctuated by copious gold chains and pools of red leather interior), Get Rich plays like it's generally been phoned in by a director who doesn't feel as though the material is worthy of serious consideration. One wonders why he went through with it – and then one recalls the film's title, and replaces the reference to mortality with the phrase, "Dance Like Your Feet Are Getting Shot At Trying". But let's hope, for Sheridan's sake, that Paramount's check clears before the film's opening weekend; it would be an understatement to say that the director's apathy towards his material is contagious.

Most of Sheridan's shots, in terms of beauty and subtext and intensity, don't match the opening credit sequence. The camera, lensed for extremely shallow focus, is mounted on the back passenger seat of a car cruising the night-washed streets of New York, and it jitters as if in reaction to the soundtrack's thumping bass. It's a literally myopic vision, and it comes to an end when the car rolls to a stop. Off camera, we hear the sound of a gun being cocked; on the screen pops the words, "Directed by Jim Sheridan." Dance, boy, dance.

"Curtis Jackson" (Fiddy to the fans) plays a version of himself called Marcus, who we first see heading trepidatiously into the robbery of a money laundering operation. The job is quickly botched, and soon Marcus is lying face up in the middle of the street, waiting to receive the nine bullets that stopped Jackson's own life in its tracks and indirectly led to his superstardom. Almost incredibly, before the gun is fired Sheridan flashes back to the late 70s. Marcus (now played by Marc John Jeffries) is a fatherless eight-or-nine year old whose mother Katrina (her name itself made unfortunately ironic by a certain natural disaster) hustles coke to pay for his sneakers. When Katrina is killed (and subsequently martyrized by every thug in town), Marcus hits the streets himself to escape a life of secondhand Converse. Still prepubescent when he picks up his first piece, Sheridan shoots the young Marcus fondling the weapon in front of the mirror, and then crossfades him through an implied chunk of years until he looks like 50 Cent. That shot of the middle schooler with the gun is clearly supposed to pack a certain kind of punch, but compared to the thematically similar but gun-free shot in the recent The Squid and the Whale, this image is weirdly lacking in potential danger.

Sheridan manages to be somewhat subtle about the fact that Marcus (and, by extension, presumably 50) didn't really *have* to turn to a life of crime. His family doesn't have money, but there's still something decidedly middle-class about the way they negotiate their poverty.  Living, after his mother's death, with his grandparents, in a comfortably ramshackle house full of nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles, Marcus has to scramble to lay a claim on sleeping space and breakfast sausage, but he's going to eat and safely sleep whether he runs drugs or not.  His mother may have been a career criminal, but it's not the family business. Marcus has a choice; he chooses to follow the cash.

Marcus falls deeper down the rabbit hole of gangsterism, and he's apparently planning a side career as a rapper all the while. We're occasionally fed crumbs about this – the most convincing involving a rhyme he records for his childhood sweetheart, full of hardcore sexual references the budding Young Ceasar admits he doesn't understand – but there's not much room in Sheridan's exposition-rife picture for Hustle and Flow-style scenes documenting the creative process. At one point, Marcus even tells us through narration that "after 3 hours, I gave up my dream of becoming a rapper and went back to selling coke." 50's character doesn't seem to be gifted with the kind of miraculous talent or undeniable need to communicate that we usually see in these kinds of movies. For two-thirds of the film, his attempts at rapping (that sweet, early ode to his "Best Friend" included) are painted as sorely lacking in either substance, style, or both. When he does, finally, get some kind of rap game together, he's instantly annointed as a god – just in time for the end credits to roll.

The best scene, a prolonged knife fight set in a prison shower, is both climactic and somewhat out of place. Having just arrived in the joint, Marcus is rushed by two Columbians with a knife. Seven or eight men get in on the fight, and Sheridan shoots most of it wide, all naked male bodies piled on top of one another, limbs entangled, the screen dripping with blood and masculinity and rage. With the short walls of the prison shower cutting off the frame into a wide, flat interior landscape, it's like a Caravaggio painting come to life. The scene is long, and very bloody, and unflinching in its portrayal of literally naked aggression. I felt like this was the only moment in which Sheridan's film really reached out and grabbed me. Whether he's a "fan" of rap or not, there's something about stripping his protagonists of their cultural dressings that allows the director to fully come out and say what he needs to say about the culture itself.

Watching 50 go through the motions here, it's very clear that something is missing. He doesn't have that X Factor personality element that makes Eminem fascinating. He's not a loose canon; he doesn't make you wonder (or even really care) about his next move. His rapping style is lazy even when it's aggressive, and his lyrics earn their potency from narrative (the direct translation of events) instead of from metaphor or commentary. Dude's been shot nine times, and you can't take that away from him (in fact, one of the glaring problems of the film is that 50's real-life "I got shot in the mouth" scar is visible the entire film, long before Marcus himself gets shot in the same place). But it's very strange that the film draws attention to the fact that 50/Marcus isn't an inherently interesting person – without those bullets, without the material culled from the first couple of chapters of his life, he'd have nothing to say.