Jan 9, 2009

Not Easily Surprised -- But I Am

I am not easily surprised by movie reviews and some of the politics of art, but T.D. Jakes' movie, "Not Easily Broken," seems poised to surprise people in the industry and the public.  The New York Times movie critic A.O. Scott does a very fair job of reviewing the Jakes initiative by framing not only the story within the context of Jakes' personae but as a separate piece of entertainment. 


Where this review truly impressed and surprised me was when Scott's courageous review not only compared "Not Easily Broken" with the highly publicized "Revolutionary Road" but praised "Not Easily Broken" as "a thousand times more honest, and more humane, than Mr. Mendes’s preening work of ersatz art."  Thank you Mr. Scott.  Here are the final two paragraphs of Scott's review:

This is the kind of picture that will probably meet with critical indifference, a response the distributors either anticipated or courted with late and scarce press screenings. Still it is worth comparing “Not Easily Broken” with another, much-written-about film about a marriage in crisis, Sam Mendes’s “Revolutionary Road,” which has energetically solicited the admiration of reviewers and awards-giving organizations. That movie, it seems to me, is fatally compromised by pretension and bad faith, by its refusal to engage with the lives of its characters other than by means of a secondhand literary conceit and a set of unexamined and dubious sociological assumptions.

“Not Easily Broken” certainly has its own, fairly transparent, ideological agenda, but is nonetheless a thousand times more honest, and more humane, than Mr. Mendes’s preening work of ersatz art. Many more people are likely to see Mr. Duke’s film, and to find it moving, edifying and even useful. That’s not everything, of course. But it’s not nothing either. 

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