Review of 8 Mile

by Roger Baldwin

Marshall Mathers, aka Eminem—the white rap artist who vaulted abruptly into widespread critical acclaim with The Slim Shady LP and consolidated his reputation with his subsequent albums—is not a professional actor and his range is limited, but he has a brooding, volatile and focused presence that compliments him extremely well in 8 Mile, the newest film from director Curtis Hanson (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys). Playing Bunny Rabbit, a trailer-park kid hoping to rhyme himself into a recording contract and out of the post-industrial apocalypse that is much of Detroit, Mr. Mathers invests his autobiographical role with a hooded-sweatshirt authenticity that moves the audience probably more effectively than could a professional. He's living a version of his life on-screen and persuasively so, his every reaction seems almost an unrehearsed expression of his personality. As an interloper, a white boy playing a black man's game, rising above the competition and reluctantly winning acceptance for it, this may be the only part he could play well and he was the perfect choice for it. Eminem is the most compelling thing about this frustrating, occasionally dull, sometimes intensely-gratifying film.

The contours of 8 Mile's story are stripped-down, and broadly familiar to those versed in the hard-scrabble genre, its screenplay is sometimes hackneyed. Rabbit lives in 8 mile—a poor, white, dead-end district adjacent to the 313 (area code) of mostly black residents who also have no destinies (Detroit replaces south-central L.A. as a depot for racial exclusion and scooped-out, stunted dreams). His welfare mother clings to an abusive, no-good boyfriend as he watches out for his baby sister. Rabbit wants ferociously to shield her from the daily emotional garbage and salvage her future, although you get the impression that it's a lost cause. Mathers works at a chassis-pressing plant—he seems to be the only character with a real job; it's unclear what the others do with their abundance of free time, although this isn't a movie with a serious drug or crime problem. There are some great, plodding passages of him simply working his shift (yet his union wages for some reason keep him broke). It's honest labor for those few who can get it and a soulless, numbing grind, as is much unskilled and semiskilled work. He aspires to something magnificent.

The real-life pathos of Mathers' childhood is powerful and not uncommon, it ought to be epic, but it is also the kind of story that is easily converted into junk food on television and movie melodramas that pander to audiences who want a discount, feel-good jolt. To sympathize with a disadvantaged people, then experience elation as one of them overcomes adversity and quickly forget about the discomforting subculture afterward, secure in the illusion that a work ethic alone levels the playing field. The writing in this movie sometimes trespasses onto that morally ambiguous territory, the satisfactions can be a bit too convenient. For every rare success, for every Eminem there are another hundred thousand who remain untalented, or unlucky, and trapped. But 8 Mile mostly succeeds despite itself. Thanks in part to Mathers' winningly-amateur naturalism; to many of the actors' give-and-take, the hanging-with-the-homies scenes have a flow that is better than the conflicts that are written into their relationships; and to Hanson's controlled directing. I left the theater revved up, and some of the images persist.

Comparisons have been made to the first Rocky, they're appropriate I guess, Bunny Rabbit, despite his skills, is supposed to be a dark horse, a long shot for success. Like that movie for a lot of people and much like Saturday Night Fever, 8 Mile has a vitality that transcends some of its dreary conventions. There is a generous heart behind the boys-in-the-hood familiarity, and it's a contagion. We care what happens to this kid, it's exciting when he's locked in the boxing ring of rapper competition. As with the audience in Old Job, the warehouse club where amateurs mount the stage to live their moments of glory, we're buzzed anticipating what's going to happen next in a largely-improvised musical sport. The first scene sets up the final, riveting climax, in between the movie has quite a few dead spots and perfunctory, long episodes that you patiently sit through, waiting for the pay-offs, the money shots. They do arrive, frequently enough to energize the whole ungainly contraption.

For those of us whose experience doesn't permit an organic connection to rap or a first-hand grasp of bottom-of-the-rung socioeconomic blight (a big-city version of the sharecropper's life), 8 Mile serves as something of an appreciation primer. We're tapped into the frustration and ambition of aspiring hip hoppers and the milieu which nurtures them. Like blues, jazz and rhythm & blues for black musicians earlier, rock and roll for Elvis Presley, alternative music for Kurt Cobain, sports for a lot of badly-born youth, rap opens a doorway out of an otherwise limited or grim existence, into security and, equally important, respect. Into self-respect. But you also get a feel for the artistry and thoughtful composition behind the rhymes. Whether or not you like rap you can appreciate it here, as in Catcher in the Rye a half-century past, as a triumph of the vernacular; as black urban roots music with white suburban sprawl. Although my roots sink elsewhere, it remains somewhat foreign to me, as Bill Monroe might be to Dr. Dre or the Carter family to Sean Combs.

Most black musical forms, particularly gospel—and soul, its most identifiable secular offspring—lift me into states of frenzied ecstasy, but the sensibility is different. Although hip-hop culture and music have many dimensions (silly, ingratiating and funky in De La Soul and Digital Underground long ago, sexy fun in Missy Elliot; stunning, life-affirming combinations with R&B, gospel and Stevie Wonder in Lauryn Hill—my catalog is embarrassingly far from comprehensive), there remains a resentment at the core of so much radio and album play (not just in the words, but in the rhythms and delivery) with which it is difficult to identify if you were not raised in cultural isolation on hopelessness and rage. On music without melody. That's changed as the industry has become a mainstreamed niche—a daily, multimillion-dollar commodity; as it has cross-bred with rock, metal and house and has attracted a large number of middle-class performers, and creative opportunists. But anger and a clench-jawed, competitive tension are the emotions that seep genuinely through this often transparent script. You hear it in the hyper-masculine put-downs of the rapping duels. It's deep in the simmering hostility of Eminem's plump eyes. You get the feeling that no amount of success would remove his shoulder's chip, even if his career were not premised on wearing it. Yet there is a gentleness in Mr. Mathers' performance. The screenplay demands he love his toddler sister (we empathize with her more than any character. She is a striking debating point for the overwhelming influence of early environment, we can envision the cute little innocent ultimately becoming her defeated, petty, needy mother. She endures a lot). But Mathers, as a nonactor, displays the conscientious adoration he would give his own daughter, it isn't a stretch for him, it's innate. Generally his voice is soft, his reactions restrained. He's very interior and shy, his darker impulses occasionally erupt in fistfights, but mostly he reserves them for his craft. And here we get a scrubbed persona, kinder gentler lyrics that contradict the hateful, bigoted image Eminem has always insisted he did not deserve. Rabbit defends a gay employee in a parking lot outside his workplace, rather than savaging him. Mathers, or his agent or the producers, apparently wants to redeem his reputation from the faggot-baiting with which many have tagged his doppelganger alter ego, Slim Shady.

Curtis Hanson is fast becoming a jack-of-all-trades, at home in diverse movie settings. In L.A. Confidential he established an enveloping noir mood, on its way to rivaling the existential tones of Chinatown until the multiple corruption twists in the narrative tangled over one another and finally hobbled its impact. In Wonder Boys, with the assistance of an excellent screenplay by Steve Kloves (The Fabulous Baker Boys, Flesh and Bones), he created one of the few films in a campus setting that was neither dandified, saccharine nor condescending. Most school movies are the beer-blast, prankster progeny of Animal House or teen coming-of-age, romantic/sexual finding-their-way-into-maturity dramas. The professoriat is alternately portrayed as sinister, totalitarian, arrogant, effete, clueless, speaking in hothouse gibberish. Wonder Boys was finely-drawn and intelligent, witty and humane, admiring of its flawed people. It made academia a hip place to be, and a literature student's ambitions sexy and metaphysically significant, personality dysfunctions and all. That is a rare accomplishment, few film makers have bothered to attempt it, and none as well.

As in his last two movies, Hanson brings an unhurried, locating-a-sense-of-place approach to 8 Mile. Detroit is hoisted up as an inglorious monument to urban decay, but he doesn't lob the images at you with artillery fire. The camera hugs the actors, from the initial shot, a close-up of Eminem's sweaty, stage-frightened face as he prepares for his first public appearance. The claustrophobic, gutted environment unfolds almost casually around the characters' experiences, it's their story, which partly compensates for the soap-opera tendencies of the script. This is a movie in which, remembering it afterward, the individual scenes lose their clarity—except for the rapping sequences which are the showpieces, the reason for making it—and you are left with a vague appreciation of Mathers' driven singularity and the camaraderie of those riding in the steerage compartment of history's wealthiest nation. It's also the first film to feature rap as a central personality, rather than mood-setting background. We should look forward to seeing more of them.

Read about 8 Mile in the Internet Movie Database

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