Movie Review: Notorious
Christopher Wallace is the center of the hip-hop canon. Any words rhymed after the late rapper's two major works, Ready to Die and Life After Death, necessarily bare his indelible imprint. And to this day, nearly a decade after his death, other rap artists are best judged by their proximity, far or near, to his imaginative excellence.
Also known as Biggie Smalls, Notorious B.I.G. or simply Biggie, Wallace combined the masterful storytelling of Slick Rick with the lyrical complexity of Rakim and a playa's ball sensibility that had yet to find its way from blaxploitation films to wax. He added to those elements a command of language -- metaphors, puns, imagery, cadence -- and a trunk-rattling, baritone voice.
The problem in making a movie about Wallace's life is largely the same as saying something new about his music. Most of what one is tempted to say has already been said. Fans, and even those with a tacit interest in hip-hop culture, are by now familiar with Wallace's popular biography. The gifted young rapper from Brooklyn, New York, triumphs over teenage years spent drug dealing to become the icon of '90s hip-hop and Bad Boy Records. At the peak of his short career, Wallace collides with a former friend, Tupac Shakur, in a rivalry that sets off bicoastal sparks.
Notorious, the biopic of Wallace released in theaters last week, begins where the rapper's well-known biography ends: with his fatal shooting in Los Angeles. As bullets fly, cars flee the scene and tires squeal, and the movie predictably peels back to Wallace's adolescence. No cliffhanger here. The narrative that follows is a fast-forward, linear trip through Wallace's life, from battle-rapping in Bedford-Stuyvesant, to reveling in the glories of mainstream musical success, to murder. The film is the sort of rags-to-riches narrative about which Wallace was wont to rap.
Notorious Trailer
The on-screen Wallace, played by first-time actor Jamal Woolard, is as close a physical likeness of the real-life Wallace as one could hope. But Woolard, a Brooklyn rapper himself, lacks the gruff emotional complexion that would've made for a thoroughly compelling portrayal.
Woolard makes Wallace come off implacably soft in the most violent of circumstances. (Such a sweetened depiction might be expected of a film that had its production overseen by Wallace's mother, Violetta Wallace, and former business partner, Sean Combs.) Veteran Angela Bassett similarly misses the mark in her one-note performance as Wallace's Jamaican-born mother. This is all the more disappointing because her performance as a mother in the classic film, Boyz 'N The Hood, was so riveting and memorable.
The actor who shines in this film, Naturi Naughton, occupies a minor role that has come under vociferous scrutiny from its real-life counterpart, rapper Lil' Kim. Kim has taken to telling anyone who will listen that she feels her portrayal in the film as Wallace's on-again, off-again mistress is one-sided and unfair.
In the end, Christopher Wallace had several identities: rap artist, drug dealer, husband, father, philanderer, gangster. Instead of choosing to concentrate on one, this film touches on all of them. Through this method, characters fall flat, slide into caricature (Sean Combs and Tupac Shakur are prime victims), and viewers leave not having learned much more than they knew about Wallace before they sat down. And some of the big questions surrounding Wallace's life -- how involved was he in Tupac's death, who actually killed him -- remain untouched.
That is not to say that one shouldn't go see Notorious. The real-life footage of Wallace's funeral, during which mourners danced to "Juicy" while his hearse passes through the streets, is worth the price of admission. The few moments like that, which do resonate, offer a fresh reminder of what all this shit -- Biggie's tragic life, the death of Tupac, hip-hop -- meant in the first place.
-- Kyle Koch
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