Rashid Johnson’s Contemporary Take On ‘Native Son’ Confuses

HBO Films

In Native Son, the 2019 adaptation of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel directed by Rashid Johnson and written by Suzan-Lori Parks, Moonlight‘s Ashton Sanders performs Bigger Parks. In their up to date model, Parks is black punk rocker with inexperienced hair and a security pin-covered jacket, who reads Invisible Man (1952) and rocks out to Death (the ’70s black punk band rediscovered in 2012’s A Band Called Death) whereas working as a motorcycle messenger. What he aspires to we’re unsure, and we don’t know a lot about his previous past the truth that his dad was an accountant who died when Bigger was younger.

Mostly, Big (as his associates name him) is offered as a group of pursuits (Death, black literature, Bad Brains, Beethoven), and it’s exhausting to know fairly how all of them join to one another to make a complete. That’s type of Bigger Parks in a nutshell on this model; a multifaceted character whose aspects are individually intriguing however cumulatively type of a complicated mess.

Big, whose associates appear to not share his love of punk — which is bizarre, dressing punk each day with no punk associates to hang around with — will get a job with Mr. Dalton, a rich Chicago actual property man performed by the all the time nice Bill Camp. Mr. Dalton is a noblesse oblige sort who apparently needs to provide Big an opportunity. Big strikes into Dalton’s massive home the place his job principally appears to contain shoveling coal into the home furnace twice a day (bizarre, however okay) and being a driver for Dalton’s school age daughter, Mary, performed by the alluringly depraved Margaret Qualley. Mary likes to drink and get together and hang around together with her communist boyfriend, Jan (Nick Robinson), usually giving off the impression that white women are nothing however hassle. Jan and Mary appear fascinated by Big’s unique blackness, asking him ignorant wealthy white folks questions like the place he spends his summers and what black folks “think about stuff.” It’s suitably cringey, if a barely over-broad.

The relationship is chummy however inherently imbalanced and predatory, and feels lots like Get Out, regardless of the a lot older supply materials. The story feels prefer it’s taking us down a considerably well-worn street of race manners till it takes a pointy left flip right into a type of Kafkaesque nightmare that Big can’t escape. It’s the identical plot level because the novel, which was all the time a reasonably daring story level, however within the supply materials, it appears extra symbolic, extra like a type of parable. In this model, properly, the route of the scene isn’t very convincing for one factor, and it’s exhausting to simply accept a nightmarish twist if it doesn’t observe. More importantly, the story isn’t clear sufficient to grasp its symbolic worth, no matter which may be.