Tennessee Williams once said of the audience and a play, "If they laugh, it's a comedy." Perhaps it's also true that "If they yell `kill 'em,' it's a gladiator show."
The audience I saw it with had both those responses at John Singleton's new movie, "Baby Boy," the tale of a 20-year-old slacker in L.A.'s South Central who fathers two children with different women without growing up himself. And I'm not sure the responses I heard always came where Singleton wanted them.
Singleton's writing and directing strategy here is to gear the most in-your-face domestic squabbles for laughs of recognition, then push them toward violence. Sometimes it ignites, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it amounts to weightless movieland stuff, sometimes it's sickening and for real.
Since his characters don't deepen all that much when the action darkens, the movie plays like an R-rated family and romantic farce with jarring bouts of smash-mouth fisticuffs and gunplay.
Subtlety has never been Singleton's thing, not even in "Boyz 'N the Hood." He wants this movie to protest the arrested development of African-American men, so he starts with the image of a grown man in a fetal sac. That's our introduction to Jody (Tyrese Gibson), who still lives with his mother Juanita (Adrienne-Joi Johnson). He chases women almost randomly, though he loves Yvette (Taraji P. Henson), the mother of his only son, and feels he should come and go from her apartment - with her car - as if he were her live-in man or husband. Jody fixes bikes for neighborhood kids and still puts together toy cars, but otherwise he's spinning his wheels.
Since all we do is watch those spokes turn for two hours, it's impressive that Singleton holds our attention. One reason is the relative novelty of seeing a semi-serious movie send up its own romantic leading man. As Jody, Gibson shows potential. Maybe because he's sexually confident, he's not afraid to look ridiculous. The crowd roars when they first see him reduced to riding on a bike.
Next to the massive Ving Rhames - who enters the action as Jody's mother's new lover, Melvin, a reformed gang-banger and ex-con with a landscaping business - Gibson is like a toothpick beside a cigar. There's a convulsive moment when Gibson smells breakfast cooking and rises to see Rhames, intimidatingly naked, getting ready to bring it to his mother in bed. (Singleton can't resist having Melvin instruct Jody on the Oedipus complex, as if we didn't get the point.)
