{"id":13317,"date":"2020-02-05T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-05T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=13317"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:19:38","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:19:38","slug":"review-cane-river","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/review-cane-river\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Cane River<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Horace B. Jenkins\u2019s Cane\nRiver<\/em> (opening in Brooklyn this Friday) is one of those stories\nof cinematic archaeology<\/a> where the backstory threatens to overtake the film\nitself. Written, produced, and directed by Mr. Jenkins, shot on location in\nLouisiana with an all-African-American cast and crew in 1981, it never saw a\nproper theatrical release; Jenkins only lived long enough to see it premiere in\nNew Orleans, dying shortly thereafter (he was only 42). Long thought lost, a\nnegative resurfaced in 2013, was painstakingly restored, and is now getting an\nart-house release from Oscilloscope Laboratories. That<\/em> is a hell of a story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story onscreen isn\u2019t quite as compelling, but how could\nit be? The kind of back-to-the-hometown, simple-pleasures, small-town-romance tale\nthat would subsequently become a Hallmark movie mainstay, it stars Richard\nRomain as Peter Metoyer, a well-regarded college football player who turns down\nhis pro draft offer (\u201cThey asked me, I just wasn\u2019t interested\u201d) to return to\nthe Bayou community where he grew up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t like the way I was being treated,\u201d he explains. \u201cI\nfelt like a ham on a hook.\u201d The commodification of black athletes \u2013 a topic\nthat\u2019s only grown more present in the national conversation, particularly after\nlast year\u2019s High Flying Bird <\/em>\u2013 is not\nonly prescient. It\u2019s narratively pointed, as much of the film centers around an\nold plantation and its history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
(Oscilloscope Laboratories)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Though the film is ostensibly a romance between Peter and an\nambitious local woman, Maria (Tommye Myrick), the real subject is the tension\nin this historic \u201cfree community of color\u201d between its lighter-skinned,\nwell-to-do Creoles and darker-skinned, working-class African-Americans. That\ntension manifests itself in the central relationship \u2013 Peter is Creole, Maria\nis not \u2013 and when their blossoming romance is threatened by arguments over\nwhether his ancestors owned \u201cthe biggest slave plantation in these parts\u201d and\ncollaborated with the Confederate Army, it\u2019s a reminder of how history\nreverberates through these communities, and is, so often, simply inescapable. Cane River<\/em> is ultimately about grappling,\nand coming to terms with, that history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myrick and Romain have a lovely, relaxed chemistry, which is\nnecessary; much of her story concerns her testy relationship with her\ndisapproving brother and their domineering mother, whose ultimatums and\nharassment reduce this poor grown woman to sneaking around like a teenager.\nTheir arguments, particularly a big blow-up near the film\u2019s end, can veer\nJenkins\u2019s otherwise naturalistic storytelling into church-play theatrics, and\nthere are other issues: dialogue that sometimes skids into clich\u00e9 (\u201cThere\u2019s a\ngreat big world out there for me, and I wanna see it!\u201d); a reliance on\nmusic-video style montages (the narrative stops dead for not one, but two\nseparate New Orleans travelogues), with an R&B soundtrack full of comically\non-the-nose lyric-to-action match-ups; and an ending that is somehow both drawn\nout and abrupt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
(Oscilloscope Laboratories)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

None of which devalues the picture in the slightest. When\nPeter steps off the bus in its opening scenes, the whole town gathers to meet\nhim (complete with a big \u201cWELCOME HOME\u201d banner), and the film feels like that\nkind of community collaboration. Its low budget certainly shows; contemporary\nindie-devouring audiences should be aware that it\u2019s a throwback to an earlier\ntime, when simply completing a motion pictures was such a Herculean (and prohibitively\nexpensive) task that blown lines, technical gaffes, and amateurish acting were\nnot only forgivable, but expected. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Jenkins milks the built-in production values of its serene locations, and coaxes warm performances out of much of its cast. More importantly, it plays now like an oasis, during one of the driest periods of African-American filmmaking; part of the reason Spike Lee\u2019s She\u2019s Gotta Have It<\/em> (a film with some of the same flaws) was received so enthusiastically four years later was because independent black film was all but non-existent, and portrayals of black romance and sensuality were even rarer. Cane River<\/em> has both, within a vivid portrait of small-town, working-class African-American life \u2013 something we still<\/em>, sadly, rarely see in the cinema.  \"\"\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

B<\/strong><\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Horace B. Jenkins\u2019s Cane River (opening in Brooklyn this Friday) is one of those stories of cinematic archaeology where the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":13318,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[1098,162],"class_list":["post-13317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews","tag-movie-review","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13317"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22912,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13317\/revisions\/22912"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}