Post by StevePulaski on May 17, 2019 15:06:47 GMT -5
Higher Learning (1995)
Directed by: John Singleton
Directed by: John Singleton
From left: Laurence Fishburne, Omar Epps, and Ice Cube in Higher Learning.
Rating: ★★
John Singleton's Higher Learning is set on the fictitious campus of Columbus University, named after the famous European explorer, which already gives you an indication of the hot-bed of tension we're stepping into. However, if you asked the administrators at Columbus, they'd probably give you some long-winded spiel about how their campus is diverse and accepting of students from various walks of life. That may true, but the students themselves are a different story.
Singleton's camera weaves around the busy campus and follows a handful of undergrads as they navigate the treacherous waters of higher education. Amidst the new freshman class is a young black man named Malik (Omar Epps), a white woman named Kristen (Kristy Swanson), and a white man named Remy (Michael Rapaport). Malik was recruited by Columbus for his impressive performance in track and field. On the first day, he walks onto the track in street clothes and gets a rude wake-up call from his no-nonsense coach, who sees through his cocky exterior. Malik, too, gets an even ruder awakening in Professor Phipps' (Laurence Fishburne) political science class. With a monotone drawl, a pipe, and a refusal to play favorites in his large class of coeds, Phipps begins the first day of class by reading the names of students whose tuition checks haven't cleared. He throws them out of class, one of whom Malik, who tries and fails to play the "black card" to his professor, and reminds them there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Meanwhile, Kristen's first week of school is soiled by a frat party where she becomes the victim of date-rape by an intoxicated jock. Shattered and alone, she becomes friends with an older student named Taryn (Jennifer Connelly), a lesbian who is also the head of the feminist group on campus. Taryn takes Kristen under her wing, as upperclassmen often do with some freshman, and Kristen's eyes are opened to the sexual fluidity she didn't know she had. A similar thing happens to Remy, a social outcast who eventually finds "friends" in an underground Neo-Nazi cult, who feed him platitudes of the racist and privileged that get his impressionable mind spinning about the coming extinction of pure white Aryan men and women. Although many of the characters in the film change in a drastic way, Remy's might be the strongest; it's undoubtedly the one with the most consequences.
Another recurring presence is Fudge (Ice Cube), who is referred to as a "super-duper senior" by a fellow student in the first scene we see with him. Fudge is in his sixth year of school, mostly because he hasn't accumulated all the necessary credits to graduate, but, too, because we get the sense that he enjoys being on campus and continuing to "initiate," so to speak, the new blood that comes around every year, with the wisdom he's garnered over the years. I've long told my peers to enjoy college, for it's likely the only time in one's life where they will be surrounded by so many inspiring, driven individuals with passion and ambition. You get the sense that, beneath the gruff exterior, Fudge feels the same way.
Higher Learning comes four years after Singleton's incredible debut, Boyz N the Hood, which led him to become both the youngest and first black director to be nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards, and follows the rock-solid romantic drama Poetic Justice. Singleton was 26 when he made Higher Learning, just four years of USC, and likely with the wheels of his mind still spinning from his own dose of "higher learning." It recalls Spike Lee's School Daze insofar that it clearly believes in the principles preached by college campuses all over the country, but can't ignore the reality that is the often clique-centric and compartmentalized nature of universities. Singleton shows a legion of bright-eyed, eager students who flock with their own, so to speak, and continue to otherize their peers without actually knowing them as people. A theme of self-righteousness swims through the film and, in doing so, submerges many of its characters.
Higher Learning's premise is a good one, and Singleton rounds up an ensemble cast of youthful performers who bring life to his many characters. The downside in play is the melodramatic tendencies of the picture, complete with an obnoxious score that overplays its hand every chance it gets. Aside from a cloying soundtrack, there's simply too much packed into this two-hour picture. Things happen drastically and subsequently end in a flash. Remy's conversion to white supremacy feels almost instantaneous, and comes off as hokey, despite Rapaport being a convincing actor. Singleton's overstuffed screenplay pays a price as it enters its third act, when the characters become victims of a topical wraparound that, while sadly realistic, maybe moreso presently than it was almost 25 years ago, can't help but take away from the nuances of blossoming individuals that we get to meet over this period in time.
It's those nuanced observations that are more intriguing than the bigger picture stuff on which it focuses. It's more interesting to see how a campus that predicates itself on diversity and acceptance, though is still named after a controversial historical figure, plus has so many pockets of racial segregation, than to see a broad-reaching, climactic finale most moviegoers will see coming before the hour-mark. In an early scene, a white woman is seen clutching her purse while in an elevator with a black student. That's the type of small instance that happens on college campuses around the country daily, and somebody like Singleton, who I'd argue was already an established filmmaker at this point in history, is smart and observant enough to make it a scene. When it goes the direction we expect, not to mention all but discard the rape of Kristen a few beats after it takes place, it turns into a muchness. That blasted score doesn't help matters either.
Even Professor Phipps — another wise character chiseled by Laurence Fishburne, who served as a compelling voice of modesty and reason in Singleton's debut — walks and talks like an out-of-touch caricature with a tired "boostrap" mentality you wouldn't so easily find on a campus as allegedly tolerant and accepting as Columbus.
Singleton works well with large settings. You could argue that despite its concentration on three individuals, Boyz N the Hood essentially wandered the street-corners and cuts of South Central L.A. Poetic Justice was a road movie. After Higher Learning, which was Singleton's biggest film at the time in terms of set and thematic heft, he followed it up with Rosewood, a criminally under-seen dramatization of the 1923 Rosewood massacre, where he basically let his camera roam around a black town that was ravaged and set ablaze by racist whites. Higher Learning is not a victim of its big set but of its operatic sensibilities. It tries to encompass too much and feels hyperbolic when it shifts its attention away from those compelling nuances of everyday college life.
Starring: Omar Epps, Michael Rapaport, Kristy Swanson, Laurence Fishburne, Ice Cube, Jennifer Connelly, Tyra Banks, and Regina King. Directed by: John Singleton.