Rosewood
with Jon Voight, Ving Rhames
Written by Gregory Poirier
Directed by John Singleton
by Scott Hefflon
Rosewood is one of those rare movies that is beautifully set, rich and believable in time, place, and culture, yet painful for those exact same reasons. The frenzied mob of whites who killed between 70 and 250 Blacks in Rosewood, Florida in 1922 is a true story, and one brought chillingly to life before your eyes. Not since Dances with Wolves have I been so sickened by my white ancestry. While in each case, the viewer can be sickened from a distance, using time and geography as buffers, what drives the point home is watching how hate is taught, passed from father to son. It is considered coming of age, learning how to hate, it is to be a man. And that can happen anywhere at any time. That’s what turns my stomach.
Jon Voight plays an open-minded grocer who profits from both Blacks and whites. Ving Rhames plays a mysterious stranger who rides into town with cash in pocket and leadership in his heart. When a white woman is beaten by her white lover, she fabricates the story that a Black man beat her (but did not rape her, she stresses) in order to cover her white ass to her husband. Two Black women witness the beating and try to soothe her, but she throws them aside, cries out that a “nigger” did it, and the Black women don’t say a word out of fear. One of the Black woman, played by Esther Rolle, was midwife to many of the white folk in town, but that doesn’t stop them from blowing a very large hole in her the moment she says it was a white man who beat the woman. While that’s skipping ahead a bit, all that matters is that once the white townsfolk rallied together, mob mentality overtook them. Once the taste of blood was on their lips, they began killing with or without reason. What began as a manhunt to find a killer soon became a racial slaughter merely because they knew they could get away with it, everyone else was doing it, and everyone had convinced themselves they were truly justified in their actions. As I said, it’s sickening to watch humans become like that. Probably the worst part, for me at least, was watching the buried resentment, the generations’ deep racism boil to the surface, making formerly God-fearing folk into ugly, hateful, vicious killers. And proud killers at that. Like proud hunters, the men photographed each other in front of mangled, burned, hanged bodies of humans they’d killed as if they were trophies. There was no shame, no concept of cold-blooded murder, they were proud. They cut off ears and fingers to save as souvenirs. This really happened.
The fact that Rhames and Voight saved many women and children by convincing some nice white train engineers to ride a desperate midnight run is beside the point. Humans were tortured and died terrible and disgusting deaths at the hands of men. Rosewood is not a chick flick filled with sensitivity (although there is much, in contrast to the overwhelming evil), it’s not a guy flick filled with booze and guns (while there are plenty of both and the body count is staggering, this ain’t the kind of impersonal hero-kickin’-ass stuff we dig), it sure isn’t a cuddling couple film, it isn’t a very pleasant film for either Blacks or whites to watch (especially not together), it sure ain’t for kids, and I doubt older folks will want to watch this horror. So who should watch Rosewood? Anyone who wants to watch a great, yet very disturbing film.
