Tight-Assed Charisma

Get Rich or Die Trying

Directed by Jim Sheridan

Rapper 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson) peddles the by-now boilerplate hip-hop fairy tale-or thug tale-that he once sold drugs, survived several gunshot wounds and then became a rap star. His movie debut, Get Rich or Die Trying (named after his multiplatinum 2003 debut album), adds clarity to his shtick. It certifies that Fitty himself is a drug. His poison is sold by Interscope Records, Paramount Pictures, MTV and corporate umbrella Viacom to hook the culture on the capitalist insensitivity and greed he personifies.

This thug tale is so rote (repeated by countless rap wannabes) that the movie is an almost fascinating demonstration of the way hip-hop's dullest cliches have captivated millions as the new rise-to-riches folklore. Kids obviously want to believe Fitty's self-infatuated fantasy, since it sells them the easy route to accomplishment (easy because it justifies the zero-thought impulses of vengeance and greed, which are distinct from justice and survival). But more shamefully, adults like director Jim Sheridan and screenwriter Terence Winter enjoy Fitty's fabrication and take part in spreading it, because it fulfills their own zero-thought impulses-such as white social guilt and guilty (indefensible) pleasure.

It's instructive to note that Irish native Sheridan has made Fitty's vanity project as a sequel to his 2003 film In America. That story of a young Irish family who illegally immigrate to New York fed off the hardiest bootstrap American legends, not a few of them perpetuated by hip-hop's highly syncopated tales of underdog ambition (Sheridan also featured the willed optimism of The Lovin Spoonful's "Do You Believe in Magic?"). In America, connected to previous Sheridan films such as My Left Foot, The Boxer and In the Name of the Father-tough fairy tales of Irish folk struggling against hardships that were either existential or just plain bigotry, oppression and their own damned melancholy. These were marvelous not simply for their palpable social concerns, but for Sheridan's humane sensitivity. Unfortunately, Get Rich or Die Trying has neither. (Ireland's best filmmaker, Neil Jordan, once told me how much he enjoyed the '90s hip-hop single "Mistadobalina" by Del the Funkee Homosapien. Jordan's totally marvelous and politically complex Breakfast on Pluto makes me wish it was he who scrutinized 50 Cent.)

Sheridan has turned himself into a cultural zombie, operating on hip-hop cliché and knee-jerk liberal indulgence. This movie is haunted by that horrible line from Alan Parker's bothersome hit The Commitments: "The Irish are the niggers of Europe." That's a rank form of political identification, but it's probably infectious for anyone who thinks his people are both unfairly treated and widely exoticized. This sentimentality might explain Sheridan's bad judgment. He probably relates to Fitty playing disadvantaged ghetto rat Marcus Greer as the flip side of Djimon Hounsou's displaced, HIV-positive African painter in In America. Hounsou's deeply humane alien beauty pulled off that film's Spielbergian conceit, but Fitty is too much a creature of hip-hop decadence and recognizable, real-life criminality to win one's assent to his noxious message. Not knowing the difference makes Sheridan seem a fool, or at the very least, a well-meaning racist.

A moviemaker who can detail the conflict of retribution and rebirth that was at the heart of Daniel Day-Lewis and Emily Watson's Irish-troubles love story in The Boxer should have been able to see through Fitty's bluster and question the way hip-hop, post?Dr. Dre (Fitty's sometime producer), has corrupted the African American human-rights struggle. Not doing so leaves Sheridan as unreliable on the American drug scourge as the trashy movies Sugar Hill and New Jack City (from which Winter's script borrows).

It isn't enough to say that Sheridan lacks firsthand knowledge of Fitty's experience; artists can intuit truth. But Sheridan fails because he accepts Fitty's rap legend ("It was time to go into the family business," Marcus defends his drug-dealing) without probing it. Sheridan denies himself the thoughtful ambivalence that complicates such Ernest Dickerson ghetto films as Juice and his fascinatingly lurid diptych Bones and Never Die Alone.

Looking at this film's hyperactive style, Sheridan seems enlivened by America's gangsta movie heritage-James Cagney's urban criminal exploits as interpreted by Fitty. (Cinematographer Declan Quinn's mobile camera pitches itself into Marcus' violent melees. Home-life scenes are packed with desperate faces, a romanticizing of poverty that suggests a hip-hop, poetic-realist version of Angela's Ashes but not Fitty's actual suburban roots.) This misjudgment seems based in Sheridan's empathy for dissatisfied young men like Fitty-yet he's stuck with the mandate to validate a guy who has the most tight-assed charisma of any star in pop.

While Depression audiences thrilled to Cagney's belligerent audacity, 50 Cent's audience responds to a retrograde style of nerve. As Marcus witnesses his drug-dealing mother's demise and suffers the near-hostile tolerance of the distant relatives he lives with, he uses hip-hop to voice his frustration. "Even when you were a little boy, I could never tell what you were thinking," says his grandmother (Viola Davis). And his girlfriend, Charlene (Joy Bryant, who evokes Eva Marie Saint's sweet yet anxious look in On the Waterfront), tells him, "Men hide their emotions; you bury yours." Somehow, hip-hop fans see and hear a provocative persona. Faking privation, Fitty flashes a spoiled child's smile-a sign of arrogant defiance. He's sneaky, perhaps, but he's not untutored, just maltutored, having ingested Tupac's bluster without thinking. He has a soft voice and big toothy grin but it's his lockjawed rapping style that is his signature. His stealthy and underanimated projection recalls Harlem rapper Mase. And though Fitty's narrow-slit eyes are a furtive contrast to his over-pumped body, they can imply a distinct hint of menace.

This tells us a lot about what today's culture likes in public figures-all of it crude. But it's wrong to blame this film's insufficiency on Fitty's lack of emotiveness; that's his trademark. The real problem is that Winter (a Sopranos hack) gives Marcus no emotional context. In the midst of Bill Duke's ludicrous Vito Corleone impersonation and Marcus' sketchy friendships (including another brilliant but delimited star turn by Terence Howard), the taciturn Fitty comes across as soulless, like Madonna.

Hip-hop's greatest rappers (Chuck D, Brad Johnson of the Geto Boys, Biggie, LL Cool J and sometimes Ice Cube) offered more than Fitty's insolent and profane insinuations. Their recordings deconstructed national politics and found new, personal identities through ingenious innovations of American language and rhythm. Fitty can ride a good beat (as "In Da Club" certainly proved), but he's a slug. And this movie romanticizes his nonsense without truthfully accounting for his cultural impact. Sheridan and Winter don't show the interesting part of Fitty's career, the CD-hustling and mixed-tape programming that semi-revolutionized the culture. Instead, they emphasize the gangsta myth as more important than the music.

Sheridan and Winter let Fitty play on trite sympathy for a kid who says, "I was looking for my father all my life. I realized I was lookin' for me." Their indulgence hits bottom in Marcus' post-gunshot recording session, when his girlfriend beams, "Your voice is better. It's got more pain in it." It's clear then that Sheridan can't tell the difference between pain and pathology. Had Sheridan held on to his humanity, artistry and honesty, this film would be retitled Get Rich AND Die Trying.