Justin Phillips’ column on local culture from an African American point of view launches.
Editor’s note: In this new column, San Francisco Chronicle feature writer Justin Phillips will write from the African American perspective in the Bay Area, starting with how it feels being a black man hearing other people tell him how it is being a black man in San Francisco. The column will appear every other Friday in Datebook. You can write to Justin at jphillips@sfchronicle.com.
Few feelings in my life have ever been as discomforting as being the only black man in a movie theater filled with white people watching “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” and then hating the film. Especially when the white people around me clearly had the opposite opinion.
For instance, during an emotional scene in the latter half of the film where two characters grieve the death of a mutual friend, the theater was silent. I assumed the nonblack audience saw the scene for what it was: a subtle glimpse into the psyche of the black community and how violent deaths, especially when they hit close to home, are impossible to reconcile. The scene hit its emotional peak when one of the actors suddenly burst into tears.
Then someone in the audience laughed.
Clearly there was a disconnect between what I, a black moviegoer, and the white audience were pulling away from the film. The fact is also evident in the movie’s critical reception.
On Rotten Tomatoes, a fairly reputable source for gauging the overall reception of a movie, “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” was labeled “Certified Fresh” with a Tomatometer rating of 92 percent, which means it’s one of the year’s best films. Critics are calling it “psychologically fascinating,” “visually stunning” and “poetic and picturesque.”
Rolling Stone’s 4½star review called the film “one of the best movies of 2019 by a long shot,” while the Los Angeles Times glowingly said it was a “moving ode to a city in flux.” Even The Chronicle chose to make it a Critic’s Pick behind the fact that it was an “indelibly beautiful story.”
Clearly, there was a disconnect between what I and the white audience got.
The critics behind all those reviews are white.
The air of support surrounding this movie, which will be released for streaming and on Bluray in August, was suffocating and unavoidable. As a black person, discussing the film with white people was equivalent to being in an emotional conga line — they danced to positive vibes, so I just moved my feet along with them.
All the while, I could hear that spoon from “Get Out” rotating around the lip of the teacup.
Disparage black art and to the sunken place you go, Justin.
So, instead of the truth, I’d lie and say I enjoyed the film, too.
And there was some honesty in that statement. I love that the film exists. Black art is needed, especially work that highlights the struggle of diminishing black populations in cities like San Francisco. I even see myself, to an extent, in the film’s main character — a young man navigating a changing city and just hoping to have a piece of it that he can call his own.
What makes my feelings even more difficult to reconcile is the fact that black films are in vogue for my generation of 20 and 30something moviegoers. There’s a cadre of black actors, in that same age range, who are becoming synonymous with box office gold, including Chadwick Boseman, Tessa Thompson, Michael B. Jordan, Daveed Diggs, Lupita Nyong’o and Lakeith Stanfield.
Who am I to stop their shine? Who am I to worry that the success, though substantial, feels fraught, as if a few bad projects could turn the tide and the same stars could find themselves out of the spotlight? Success in black culture perpetually feels as though it’s happening on borrowed time.
What I’ve come to realize is that this guilt, this inability to comfortably criticize a film that has inherent value within my black community, is emblematic of a greater problem in movie criticism — there need to be more black film critics at major media outlets.
The conversations I have with my two brothers about the shortcomings of a black film shouldn’t feel like an unpopular opinion in mainstream media. Without more perspectives, a disservice is done to movies like “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.” Displacement, and the racism tied to it, might become more synonymous with the beauty of rolling, cinematic long shots and the absence of dialogue than with pain and confrontational moments.
So though the film left me wanting a more robust story, I do believe “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” will have a legacy: serving as a call to arms for major media to find and hire more black critics.
Movies of its ilk deserve better, more diverse criticism. The voices highlighted in the art need to be more prominent in the critique. Then maybe, just maybe, I won’t have to spend weeks wrestling with how to tell white people that I didn’t enjoy a black movie. Instead, some new writer could do it for me.