FFWD Weekly
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| Film by FFWD Staff Slam Director Marc Levin, who spent years as a documentary filmmaker exploring the underbelly of the black ghettos of Washington, D.C., was once asked by a street kid when he was going to make a "real movie." The question stuck in his head for years, and Slam became his answer. Set in Washington, Slam tells the story of Ray Joshua, an original gifted rapper/poet trapped in a war zone housing project known as Dodge City. When Ray is arrested on a petty drug charge, he is sucked into the black hole of the D.C. criminal justice system. While there, he finds his salvation in Lauren Bell, a social worker/writing teacher who helps him to understand and cultivate his skill. Using his wits and his dazzling verbal talents to get him through his time in prison, Ray learns to survive both in and out of prison and to deal with the various transitional periods that he’s forced through by the justice system. Slam’s true poetry lays not in the words of actor/poet Saul Williams, who carries the weight of this lofty film on his lanky shoulders. Instead, it is found in director Levin’s amazing ability to virtually recreate reality in a dramatic setting. One stunning and brilliant scene is a single-shot argument between Williams and co-script writer/actor Sonja Sohn. The shot goes on for minutes and I have never seen two actors interlocked in such a provocative and truthful confrontation that is so realistic one would swear the two were really going at it. Levin’s documentary work has given him an obvious eye for detail and the man is a genius when it comes to expunging realistic performances from mostly non-actors. To be honest, the stream-of-consciousness type of poetry that Williams and others rattle off in the film doesn’t have the depth that the film purports, and the street life/culture exposed here is nothing new. The struggle presented in Slam has been seen countless times before in films like Boyz in the Hood and Menace II Society. It is not the script that carries Slam to the stunning dramatic level that it achieves; it is the performances, and Levin’s admirable grasp of the underlying nobility of his characters. Levin realistically identifies their struggle as being internal as much as it is the weight of an unjust society. And this brilliant point takes Levin one level above other anarchistic, one-dimensional-thinking directors like Spike Lee. |
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