Mother and Child: A THOUSAND AND ONE

As A Thousand and One starts, Inez (Teyana Taylor) is getting out of prison. She’s a young woman. She has no family, no support, and no safety net. It’s 1994. New York City is entering its so-called revitalization, with its then-mayor’s attention on “broken windows” issues. It’s also rapidly pushing out those who can barely afford to live there as is. Inez wants more. Hustling to make ends meet as an independent freelance hairdresser, sees a small boy, barely out of his toddler years, on the sidewalk. “Don’t you remember me?” she asks him. He does, barely. Mostly he remembers how she said she’d take care of him, and then disappeared. “Look at me so I know you not mad,” she says. He’s not mad, just cautious of getting hurt again. We can read that in his hesitantly darting eyes. Eventually, she’ll ask if he wants to live with her for a few days. When he says yes, those days become years, and a secret that grows until it is just an unspoken fact. This makes this film not a thriller coiled around a lingering suspense, but a tender character piece, generous to the contours of the lives it reveals to us.

It’s important that this movie gives us so much and so little at the start. We don’t know why Inez was incarcerated, and we don’t know how this boy ended up so neglected by the foster system that it barely seems to notice when he slips away with her. But we do know she cares about him, and wants a better life for the two of them. This powerful maternal urge drives the story as the film becomes a finely-detailed domestic drama against the backdrop of a world that doesn’t look kindly on those barely keeping themselves from falling through the cracks. Writer-director A.V. Rockwell, in a confident feature debut, centers this woman’s struggles to find love and acceptance and security without turning her into an object lesson or a source of cheap sentimental uplift. The movie’s too honest to cheapen her experience, which plays out less like impoverished melodrama and more like the truth. Here’s an American dream—to scrape and hustle and try every day to eke out just a little bit more in the face of enormous odds, in which deepening poverty or isolation is one wrong step away.

The screenplay, quietly slipping from ’94 into the early aughts with a triptych approach that compares favorably to Moonlight, draws in vivid detail their normal struggles. Both mother and son develop as people and as a family. He grows into a young man with school, friends, and girls to navigate, as she finds jobs to make ends meet, a crumbling apartment to slowly fill with comforts, a complicated love with a boyfriend. This is set against the backdrop of institutional neglect. An absent landlord sells to a worse one. A school sees potential and also backhanded compliments. A good male role model also has flaws. And, of course, social services, and eventually jobs and colleges, can’t be set up on the boy’s fake birth certificate and social security number. This never becomes the main preoccupation of the film—though it also peppers its time jumps with archival audio of conservative mayors promising the city big positive changes that certainly aren’t reflected in the lived experience of its characters. But instead, the movie is wisely complicated and mature in its consideration of its relationships and humanity. It uses a framework of naturalistic sensibility and historical context—its precision set and sound design and costume work is exactly what its time period felt like—to accommodate an honest pessimism about broken systems and cycles of poverty, and a hard-fought romanticism about its characters’ connection and their potential.

Fitting, then, that Rockwell’s film looks lovingly at its performances. The camera is unafraid of vulnerability, pushing close on faces and really seeing them. Teyana Taylor inhabits the role of the troubled mother with a fierce sense of self-protection that barely covers an open wound of vulnerability. It’s a beguiling mix, tough and tenacious in the face of so much strife. Here’s a woman bravely remaking herself from tough times, clinging to her family as she takes what work she can, and what stability she can, to build this new foundation. This sense of discovery, of growing up into oneself through the adversity of youth and of systems built to perpetuate her disadvantage, is twinned with the boy growing older through a few performances from young actors that are so complementary, and so plain with aching vulnerabilities, they make one’s heart swell with sympathy. Both the mother and her child feel this as they yearn for a sense of self against the turbulent confusions of their lives and their times.

And yet Rockwell knows that these larger emotional arcs are nestled not in the stuff of period piece sweep or in a suspenseful conceit ticking away. No, this is a movie about the quotidian stuff of life, for these specific people in this particular time. It’s about the humanity that’s revealed and affirmed through the love they can show for one another. It’s about how love is a force that can give a life meaning, and can last beyond the temporary stuff of logic and laws. Here’s a powerful movie about genuine human connection, and its bolstering powers in the face of long odds. This isn’t a moralizing movie or a sentimental Love Conquers All message. In its perceptive framing—and softly-lit grainy photography close-cousin to a documentary naturalism—it becomes a movie that breathes with the fullness of life. Its characters become people we know, making this not only an involving emotional experience in the moment, but one I look back on as if recalling the story of someone I care about. It imbues Inez’s struggle to rebuild a life and build a loving home with such heartfelt specificity it brought to mind something Salman Rushdie once wrote about family: “sometimes we run from it…and then, very carefully, we build a new version of it for ourselves.” Here we see a woman and child try to make something real and genuine and lasting. I hope they make it.

Fresh Prince: COMING 2 AMERICA

In 1988, Prince Akeem of the small fictional African nation of Zamunda came to America, hoping to find a wife. It resulted in an amusing-enough culture-clash comedy that benefited from a star turn from Eddie Murphy at the early height of his powers, and the big budget Hollywood gloss that makes any even halfway decent comedy from the days of shooting on film look just a little bit better than the digital non-style style that passes for big screen comedy these days. Now it’s the latest 30-year-old comedy to get a belated sequel in Coming 2 America. Although this time it’s shot bright and flat like a sitcom, returning screenwriters Barry W. Blaustein and David Sheffield (with an assist from Black-ish’s Kenya Barris) have retained the original charms while dialing back some of the raunch and retrograde gender politics. Director Craig Brewer (not for nothing a better director than the original’s John Landis) finds a mellower key for a surprisingly sweet goof that flips the dynamics in clever ways.

It finds Akeem is now King of Zamunda, but without a male heir. In this male-dominated monarchy, that might cause some trouble about lines of succession, even though his hyper-competent and confident daughters are clearly some fine royal specimens capable of leading. For one thing, they’re all excellent fighters — his oldest is even The Old Guard’s KiKi Layne, so you know she can take care of herself. Still, the King’s hopes for a son are answered by the revelation that he fathered a son off-screen during the last movie. Surprise! (His best friend (Arsenio Hall) vaguely remembers the details.) So the movie’s about a thirty-year-old from Queens (Jermaine Fowler), with mom (Leslie Jones) and uncle (Tracy Morgan) in tow, turning up in the palace somewhat ready to claim his place in the royal family. (Some Princess Diaries crash courses might apply.) Though it threatens to become a loud romp, the movie is more interested in a mellow, low-key vibe, letting family dramas just sentimental enough ring out in a comic key surrounded by some good gags, and even a few musical numbers.

The cast keeps it as pleasant as the design of Zamunda — in retrospect a Wakanda spoof avant la lettre — is pleasing to the eye. They’re decked out in Ruth E. Carter’s finest patterns and styles, a little Black Panther here, tribal patterns, flowing fabrics, and elaborate jewelry there. That these comic performers carry out their silly little bits of business and amusing patter in this stunning wardrobe adds to the charms. Above all, it’s nice to see Murphy back in a comedy that plays to his strengths. It’s a perfect blend of the wilder energy of his early roles and the gentler family fare he aged into. There’s some impish sparkle in his eyes (especially in his under-makeup multiple roles reprising the barbershop jokesters from the first film), and a comfortable fatherly cuddliness to his paternal interests in the plot. And it’s poignant to see his dawning awareness of a need to push back on the patriarchy that forces him to ignore his wonderful daughters in favor of a son he barely knows. Yet best of all, perhaps, is his willingness to cede some of the spotlight to Fowler’s Prince Lavelle Junson of Queens, an appealing performance that’s in a slightly different register from Akeem. He plays the culture clash here, bringing a New York swagger to the formality of the palace. He gets a more earnest rom-com plot as he’s torn between a stunning princess (Teyana Taylor) from neighboring country Nexdoria (maybe too lightly treated for being run by a peacocking warlord (a game, energetically goofy Wesley Snipes) and his child soldiers), a match that might make good political sense, and a more relatable court stylist (Nomzamo Mbatha), who might be better for him personally. It's serious, but cute.

The whole picture is uneven, with some jokes flat and a few conceits a tad under-cooked, but the project has enough charms that I found it hard to resist. Brewer keeps the tone on track, with the simple sitcom staging inviting enough emotional investment without stamping out laughs, which in turn keep the more serious geopolitical allusions at bay. This is a character piece, not a world building endeavor or cultural argument beyond the softly insistent gender balancing. The ensemble is on the same chill wavelength, resisting overt farce for something more relaxed, an amusing and amiable consideration of generational conflict wrapped up in semi-serious stakes for this never-quite-believable kingdom. It honors the original in its throwback appeal—a reminder of a time when a movie could be a couple good star turns, some funny supporting roles, and a simple high concept executed well enough.