Notorious

The new music bio-picture, Notorious, about the short but legendary career of rapper Christopher "Biggie" Wallace (also known as the Notorious B.I.G.), was produced by his mother, Voletta Wallace, as well as his good friend and partner in the music industry, Sean Combs. Not only that, it features his real life son, Christopher Jordan Wallace, who portrays his father as a young boy in the early scenes. Right off the bat, it told me this movie was going to be more than just a little bit biased about the man. What it didn't tell me was how uninspired and generic it was going to be.

Think of all the exciting angles you could take in a movie about the life of him. You could go the traditional route, and cover his career, as well as what his music meant to the industry. You could do a movie about the rival East and West Coast war, and how it turned one of Chris' closest friends in the music business, Tupac Shakur (portrayed here by Anthony Mackie), against him. You could cover the investigation into his murder, which still remains unsolved today. The screenplay by Reggie Rock Bythewood (Biker Boyz) and Cheo Hodari Coker take most of these ideas, and covers them in a generic two hour "made for TV"-style format honoring the man, but never really digging deep into his life, his career, the numerous women who came and went, and just how he affected the industry despite only releasing one album in his lifetime. (His second album came out after he was killed at the age of 24.) The movie touches upon the war and the rivalry, but when it comes to his life and his death, it's the same old song and dance we've been listening to for years.

Notorious wants to tell us the story of Christopher's life, while at the same time being a love letter written in his memory by people who knew him best. Instead of dealing with his actual life, the movie gives us the usual bits and pieces we've come to expect. He starts out on the streets as a boy with a single mother (Angela Bassett), who tries her best to give her son a good life despite a deadbeat dad who walked out on her, and gangs on the street selling drugs. He quickly grows up, and is portrayed through most of the film by Jamal Woolard, who gives a fine performance. Chris eventually decides he needs money, gets wrapped up in gang activity, spends time in prison, and decides to go into music. All of this is covered so quickly, it's like the movie knows we've seen it all before, and isn't even interested in it. A friend of his hooks him up with Sean "Puffy" Combs (Derek Luke), and there's such a sense of "this is destiny" in the scene, it's kind of hard to take it seriously. Along the way, he strikes up relationships with various women including Jan (Julia Pace Mitchell), Lil Kim (Naturi Naughton), and Faith Evans (Antonique Smith). They all share relationships of varying degree of intimacy, and two of them actually bear him children. The way the movie skims over his relationship with them, and how he just walks in and out of their lives seemingly at will gives us the wrong impression.

What are we to make of the fact that after he marries Faith Evans, he is shown cheating on her a few scenes later? Faith storms in on him, chews him out, and he apologizes. A little later, he suspects that she's having an affair with Tupac Shakur, so he bursts in on her in the middle of an interview she's giving, and violently shakes her, throwing her against a wall in front of the cameras. She walks out on him, but near the end of the movie, they're talking on the phone and everything seems fine, with no explanation. Christopher apparently burned a lot of bridges on his way to success, but it's obviously okay because as this movie tells us, right before he died, he managed to call every single person he hurt and have a heartfelt talk with them. We constantly feel like we're only getting bits and pieces, and the movie is picking and choosing moments from his life to show us. This style is evident early on, with how the movie sets up his mother as an important character early on, then she is almost dropped entirely from the film about the 40 minute mark until the very end.

Speaking of his mother, Angela Bassett's portrayal of Valerie Wallace is inconsistent, with a Jamaican accent that seems to come and go during the course of the film. She's intended to be portrayed as a long-suffering woman, who sticks by her son's side through it all, but her character is so shallow here she's hardly worth mentioning. Surprising, since the real life Valerie was deeply involved in the production of the film. Of particular note is how her battle with breast cancer is mentioned in one scene, and then the very next scene, Christopher tells a friend that his mom's recovering, and it's never mentioned again. If her cancer played such a minor part in his life, as this movie suggests, why bother bringing it up in the first place? This is just lazy screenwriting, and the directing by George Tillman, Jr (Soul Food), is of the "point and shoot" variety, never giving us anything truly interesting to look at. Given the fast editing and eye-catching tactics that music videos are known for, you'd think something would stand out visually.

When Notorious finally reaches the conclusion we all knew was coming, it's handled clumsily. We get his friends tearing up at a funeral, and then we see his mother riding in a limo to bury her son. She looks out the window, and sees Christopher's fans lining the street. The thing is, they apparently couldn't afford any extras, so they just show stock footage of news film covering the fans standing at the street side, so it's painfully obvious that Angela Bassett is waving and looking at nothing. The movie is a huge disappointment, especially given the potential for drama. The only thing that stuck out in my mind when it was done was the fact that the film's music score is credited to Danny Elfman (a very odd choice, as anyone familiar with Elfman's work would agree), and I hardly remembered there even being a background music score in the first place.

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