I will never forget one Thanksgiving. I had to be 11 and my brother was 14. My father chose that day for us to have the talk. No, not the talk about the birds and the bees. The talk on how to get arrested. I remember thinking this seems insane but he was very serious. He walked me and my brother thru everything he wanted us to do. Use the right language and respect to the officer. Don’t say anything until I arrive. Keep your hands open. Little did I know this information would come in handy later in my life. As a black male growing up in the South, I was routinely stopped by the police. My father was preparing us to handle the inevitable.
2018’s The Hate U Give (THUG) shows the intimate details of how an officer-involved shooting can rip apart a community. Based on the book with the same name. The lead character is Starr. She is living a complicated life having to balance living in the “Two Americas”. She is balancing living in a lower income area of her city while going to the private school across town in a white neighborhood. Her father is a former gang banger turned entrepreneur and her mother is a nurse. This film starts out the same way that one Thanksgiving day did for me.
As the story progresses, Starr is leaving a party with a friend from her neighborhood and they are pulled over. Starr follows her training from her father while her friend decides a more cavalier approach. While reaching for a hairbrush in his car, the officer fires his weapon and kills her friend. The rest of the movie takes you through the process of criminalizing the victim to protest marches. Starr tries to get back to a bit of normalcy while trying to deal with the death of her friend and make sense of it all.
Critical Commentary: The movie was exactly what I hoped for. All too often we hear the names of Michael Brown, Philando Castille, Tamir Rice, and Alton Sterling. We watch the news stories and we see the clashes between police and protesters. THUG takes us through the entire process from a micro level. Starr has the job of showing the audience how the process works from both neighborhood she lives in and the one she goes to school in. Her complicated life becomes even more complicated. The surrounding cast adds to the texture of the events. Common plays Starr’s uncle and a local police officer. Anthony Mackie plays the local gang leader. Regina Hall plays the mother. Issa Rae plays the local activist leading the charge against the police. Starr is played by Amandla Stenberg made famous by playing Rue in The Hunger Games. The person who steals the show is longtime character actor Russel Hornsby. You have seen Hornsby in several roles from TV to movies but this is his best role. He plays Starr’s father, Maverick, and yes the name makes sense. He is a very complicated character who is the heart and passion of the family while trying to support his neighborhood and community.
The Xennial Cinephile 