Tell me a story

When single mother Naima Cobbs (played by Jennifer Hudson) learns that she and her teenage son Langston (played by Jacob Latimore) are being evicted from their Baltimore home, she sends the boy to New York City to spend Christmas with grandparents he’s never met. This doesn’t go so well. His grandfather, Reverend Cornell Cobbs (played by Forest Whitaker) is a stern, cold man. The two butt heads right away. Langston’s grandmother, Angela Cobbs (played by Angela Bassett) is warmer and shows more interest in getting to know her grandson, but neither of the adults seem to want to explain how they grew estranged from his mother. Langston is a teenager on the edge. He could easily stumble into a life of crime or take a step into a life powered by love, spirituality and family, if only his family would remember that they are one.

When I first watched the trailer for Black Nativity, I immediately thought of Spike Lee’s 2012 Red Hook Summer. Both movies involve a single mother sending her son to New York to spend time with an estranged grandfather who is a minister. That the premises are so similar is remarkable, but they are for sure two different movies. Red Hook Summer was a coming-of-age story that dealt with community and shame and faith. Black Nativity is more about family and how parents’ decisions affect their children’s lives, and it’s also about faith. Oh, and there’s singing too.

As you’d guess from the title, Black Nativity invokes the story of Jesus Christ’s birth. On his first day in New York, Langston meets an impoverished, young pregnant couple (played by Grace Gibson and Luke James). They represent every expecting mother and father: desperately afraid but with unbounded hope. Later, in a dream sequence, the couple portrays Mary and Joseph, which I took to mean that every mother and father is Mary and Joseph, and they should treat their little miracles as respectfully and lovingly as they would the child of God. Naima and her parents seemed to have lost that message somewhere along the line. It’s not uncommon. Life just changes things. Relationships become damaged, communication ends, a once hopeful future now just looks bleak. The story of Jesus reminds us that things doesn’t have to stay that way.

Now even to a non-religious person like myself, that message could be moving, but unfortunately the movie doesn’t make it so. It handles its thematic issues too heavy-handedly. It feels like the whole story was written to deliver a message. Characters are developed only as much as is necessary to get that message across. What this means is that you know from the beginning where the movie is going and pretty much how it will get there. There are no fun deviations. There’s not a whole lot of joy overall. Just melodrama. It would have been great to have a scene with Langston and his grandparents that didn’t come back to why his mom is mad at them. I get why it comes up so much. How could it not? Still, a break from the drama would have been much appreciated.

The melodrama got so overwhelming by the end, with Langston delivering a heartfelt speech in front of his grandfather’s entire congregation, that I tapped out. Heartfelt speeches are damned hard to pull off. It takes a lot of skill to deliver them and actually move a viewer. Unfortunately, during Langston’s speech all I saw was Jacob Latimore acting, and I just cringed. No one would really say the things he was saying the way he said them in front of a whole group of strangers. I understand that you have to suspend your disbelief all the time in movies, particularly in musicals where people break into song at the drop of a dime, but the movie has to get you to the point where you’re willing to do so. It has to earn it. Black Nativity didn’t get me there.

The music, however, I enjoyed. The film opens with Langston belting out a song in which he describes is current plight. It was full of emotion and it sounded good, both of which served to pull me in right away. All of the music was well written and had nice polish to it, though I wouldn’t call the songs catchy enough to listen to outside of the movie. Jennifer Hudson has an amazing voice, and the movie capitalizes on it, interjecting her into scenes she wasn’t even in, all so that she could sing. I can’t blame them.

Forest Whitaker, Angela Bassett and Tyrese Gibson (who plays street criminal that Langston meets in prison) all get a chance to flex their vocal cords, and they do surprisingly well. They don’t attempt to compete with Hudson or Mary J. Blidge (more on her in a second) or anything; their songs seem designed to be in their range, and they nail it. Then again I liked Russell Crowe’s singing in Les Miserables…

Now back to Mary J. Blidge. Obviously she can sing. The thing is that that’s her only purpose in the movie. You could remove her character completely and it wouldn’t make any difference. I get that she brings star power, but her presence is more distracting than helpful, especially with her white hair. Same goes for Nas’s character, which I guess brings me to one of my biggest problems with musical movies. Too often they sacrifice story and character elements in service of the music. That tends to mean I don’t get very invested in them. It helps when I really like music, a la Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, but that wasn’t the case here.

I wouldn’t watch Black Nativity again, but I would recommend it to people who like inspirational, family dramas that are kind of Bibley and have stirring music.

My Rating

Black Nativity
Director: Kasi Lemmons.
Writer: Kasi Lemmons, Langston Hughes.