Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
The word’s rolling in now, and it seems to all be pretty good. Yeah, this is essentially your typical vehicle for a music figure crossing over to film, but the devil’s in the details, and people seem to be really responding to what Curtis Hanson has done here. Let’s see what our man in Chicago thought...
Hey all. Capone in Chicago here. Strangely enough, the day before I saw 8 MILE, I was driving toward Detroit on business and suddenly understood what the title was referring to. Many of the roads in and around the Motor City are simply referred to by mile number. I passed 22 Mile Road, 24 1/2 mile Road. I didn’t quite make it to 8 Mile Road, and this movie makes me thankful for small favors. 8 MILE, marking rapper Eminem’s feature film starring debut, is a surprisingly extraordinary little film that does not try to tell the rise to riches and fame of a white rapper. Instead it’s the veiled life story of the early years of a young man who will eventually before the most successful white rapper in history. It’s the tale of a world where being caucasian is a minus, and where success is measured in 45-second streams of verbal free-style fury against an opponent.
Eminem is Jimmy Smith aka Rabbit, a man whose prowess as a wordsmith is known only to himself and a few close friends, including a man named Future (Mekhi Phifer) who hosts weekly rap challenges at a club where two men get 45 seconds and a catchy beat to basically bust on the other guy on stage. The winner is chosen by the crowd. Jimmy’s first try at this contest is a bust, as he can’t even get his mouth to open, and he’s booed from the stage. The first thing about 8 MILE that got my attention was having Eminem play a guy will no confidence and very few opportunities to express himself outside of yelling matches with his trailer-trash mother (Kim Basinger) and her boyfriend. Em does a fairly credible job of portraying a guy with a lot of pent-up rage and need for an outlet (in this case, rap music). He’s no great actor, but I was impressed with what he did. It’s kind of similar to the way I felt when I first saw Mark Wahlberg in BOOGIE NIGHTS, a sort of “I didn’t know he had it in him.”
8 MILE is not the rap version of PURPLE RAIN for many reason, the biggest of which is that there are no polished performances in the entire film. We don’t see Eminem in the studio or on stage with a crowd there to see him. All of the rapping in the film is done on the street or in the club during the contests. There’s really nothing polished about the film at all, and that works to its advantage. There aren’t any big emotional scenes and sentimental journeys. This film is about gritty realism, painful truths, and artistic expression. Any time 8 MILE threatens to stray from these elements, it suffers. Basinger is a little to pretty for me to buy as trailer trash, and with the exception of one very intense fight between her and Eminem, her character is largely pointless. The usually reliably Brittany Murphy seems to be on screen for the sole purpose of proving to us that Eminem is desirable. Her character allows Rabbit to forget the breakup of his long-time girlfriend, but she quickly becomes the neighborhood skank and butt of many on-stage jokes. I think we’re supposed to see her as Rabbit’s muse, but it doesn’t come across like that.
The crew of guys that surround Rabbit are pretty funny, and the film spends much of its time just observing this group. They don’t get too preachy about living poor or race relations, and anytime one of them does, they are laughed at. Mostly, we watch them go through their day-to-day routines, struggling to make a little money, dreaming big about when they will be rap superstars, knowing it will never happen for most of them. In many ways, 8 MILE is a movie about the ones left behind when someone makes it big, and I found myself wondering if these people existed in Eminem’s life and if he still keeps in touch with them. No, we can’t forget this is a film staring Eminem, so yes, there are jokes at the expense of homosexuals, women, white and black people. But we see the harsh words and angry feelings in their context. It adds to the film’s realism much more than simply popping in an Eminem CD does. Director Curtis Hanson (L.A. CONFIDENTIAL; WONDER BOYS) has done a great job of making a movie that is almost impossible to dismiss simply because the central actor is so controversial and much-maligned by so many. 8 MILE is a seriously well-made work.
