Amongst all the opposite issues it’s, “Rob Peace” is a portrait of a kind of extraordinary particular person whose prodigious items are yoked into service by others who haven’t got such blessings. Rob’s father is the primary instance—watch how he goes from being tearfully grateful for his son’s assist to seeming like he feels entitled to it, and makes the lad really feel responsible for not spending each waking second residing for his pop. However Rob can be a beacon of what is attainable for a lot of others in his orbit, together with neighbors, academics, and highschool and college classmates (he has the uncommon means to attract individuals from numerous completely different demographics collectively to celebration). There is a even a subplot about Rob and a few his mates realizing there’s cash to be made in shopping for and “flipping” homes, to make somewhat cash off the gentrification that began reworking numerous city neighborhoods after the flip of the millennium, together with East Orange’s and Newark’s. Rob’s bought the imaginative and prescient, however he additionally has the abilities. It quickly turns into obvious that the abilities are a part of what gave him the imaginative and prescient. You see this concept expressed even in little moments, like when Jackie and Rob have a budgeting speak and he or she reflexively has him do the mathematics.
“Rob Peace” is an bold, most likely overstuffed film that tries to pack an eventful life and all of its wider implications into two hours; it may simply have run three, or been a TV miniseries. Some parts really feel truncated or skipped-over. However that is the character of the venture—one other tragic inevitability, perhaps. (Previous film biographies used to have the ability to get away with specializing in the highlights of a life: they’d offer you 20 minutes on a personality’s childhood, then glimpses of three or 4 distinct components of their existence, then wrap issues up and roll the credit, and in some way no person within the viewers felt cheated.)
“Rob Peace” is stylistically out-of-step in one other method: it is a populist work geared toward a large viewers. It is a disgrace that motion pictures like this not get mainstream theatrical distribution (until they star Will Smith—and even then it is a cube roll) as a result of it appears to have been made with viewers reactions in thoughts. Ejiofor’s path and Masahiro Hirakubo’s modifying depart area for laughs, tears, gasps, and side-talk. There are moments the place Rob is knocked down by a problem, overcomes adversity, or makes what we all know is an enormous mistake despite the fact that he would not on the time, and also you simply know that you simply’d be capable of really feel an viewers’s collective emotional connection to the fabric on the mobile stage when you have been watching it in a crowded theater.
The very best factor about this film, although, is that it by no means holds your hand and tells you that if the film feels a method about one thing and you are feeling one other method, you are in some way “watching it incorrect.” If something, it errs on the aspect of telling you that you’ll come out of this film feeling as when you’ve seen a narrative that does not match into one field, and even a number of bins, as a result of no person’s life does.
