Hollywood Never Changes Its Mind About the River

And Misty Green is about to find out where the floodplain is

Now, I am going to tell you something about Chris Rock's film, and you are going to want to sit down, because it does not start comfortable and it does not end there either. It is a tragedy wrapped inside a problem, which is wrapped inside a set of truths so plain and painful that most people will watch it twice just to convince themselves they misread the first time. Misty Green, once brilliant, now standing sideways against a wind she helped whip up herself. I know women like that. I have been standing near them my whole life. They are not weak people. They are people who let the weather inside and then forgot to close the door.

Hollywood in this film is exactly what Hollywood has always been, which is to say a river that everybody keeps being surprised to find flowing in the same direction it has always flowed. Old Man Harper built his house on the floodplain thinking the river had reconsidered. The river had not. Hollywood has not reconsidered either. It knows exactly who it wants and exactly who it will drag face-first through the current when it is done with them, and it never once looked confused about which was which. Misty has been useful, then inconvenient, and now she is one last shot from gone. The film does not pretend otherwise.

Rock plays Jordan, the director offering her that last shot. He is the closest thing the picture has to a hopeful sign, except that he and Misty have a history tangled up like my oldest grapevine, the one that has been trying to swallow the fence since 1972. When roots run that deep and that complicated you do not just yank at them without knowing what else comes up. Jordan knows this. Whether he acts accordingly is another matter, and the film is honest enough not to let him off the hook cheap.

The audition scene is where the whole thing lands. Misty is not just reading for a part. She is fighting her own history in real time, and every line she tries to say has another one underneath it. That is the film's best work, and Rock earns it. The past does not arrive knocking soft. It arrives the way Old Lady Thompson's second shadow arrived last winter, quiet and wrong, there before you had a chance to decide what you thought about it. The doctor called it a trick of the light. We all knew what it was. You do not argue with a thing like that. You note it, you keep your head, and you get on with the business at hand.

Misty's trouble is not a lack of talent. She is like the town's old well, deep and full of good water, except nobody has cleaned it out in years and now anything you pull up has a funny smell. Talent left to its own mess curdles. She has got the potential and the wreckage sharing the same square footage, and the film is sharp enough to know those two things are not mutually exclusive. Most disasters are not ambushes. They are the logical conclusion of every choice you looked away from.

The lesson here is not a gentle one. You do not have to be unlucky to end up like Misty Green. You just have to be talented enough to believe you can manage the rot later, and later has a way of arriving before you have had your coffee. Tend your life the way you tend anything worth having: regular, honest, unglamorous. A garden that only gets attention in a crisis is not a garden, it is a pending emergency with decorative ambitions.

The fruitcake came back to me this past Christmas with a note tucked in the tin that said simply, still here. I was not surprised. That is the nature of things made with care and a little stubbornness. Misty Green, if she survives this film and herself, might turn out to be the same kind of thing. Or she might not. Either way, the river is going where the river goes.

Don't flatter yourself and leave your porch unsalted. , Aunt Dot
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