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Review: In ‘The Hate U Give,’ a Police Shooting Forces a Teen to Find Her Voice.

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'The Hate U Give' | Anatomy of a Scene

George Tillman Jr. narrates a sequence from his film where Maverick, played by Russell Hornsby, teaches his children how to behave around the police.

"My name is George Tillman Jr., and I am the director of "The Hate U Give." We always called this scene "the talk." The scene was actually in the middle of the book, but we decided very early on to move it at the top of the film. What I love about this scene is, outside, you see a normal neighborhood, with a lot of playing. It feels like a Saturday afternoon. But I cinematically wanted to move slowly towards this house, to really show that, while everyone is having a good time playing, there's important business being done with the Carter family. The first guy we see is Mav Carter. You see a guy who got braids, and he got a tattoo, so your assumption is that this guy is a gang member and he's up to no good. But as the scene sort of progressed, I love turning the scene on its head and seeing that he's not who you think he is." "Now, one day, you're all going to be with me, and you best bet we gonna get pulled over." He's a guy who's a father, a husband, and he's talking about something that's a very serious issue, that he's telling them to put their hands on the table. "You're going to see me with my hands like this." What I love about this scene is that this feels like a normal conversation like somebody would have about the birds and the bees with their children. But this is a scene that's very normal in a lot of African-American families across the country, which is, how you keep your kids safe. How do you get them to understand how to act around police officers? It's all about a father protecting his family. "It can get real dangerous, so don't argue with them. But keep - " The rehearsal for the scene was very important. It started off by rehearsing a scene with Lamar Johnson, who plays Seven, and Amandla Stenberg, who plays Starr. They rehearsed the scene, but they are not actually in the scene, but I only rehearsed it with them so they could have it as a backstory for them, moving forward, for the rest of the film. "Now, just because we got to deal with this mess, don't you ever forget that being black is an honor, because you come from greatness." But the young kids who played the scene in the film, I didn't rehearse with them. I wanted them to be on camera for the first time experiencing that. So what we do - we're seeing three different kinds of dynamics in this scene, is understanding the subtext of what an African-American family go through in the inner city. We're seeing a father figure who is very present in the household. And we're seeing a relationship that shows a loving relationship between a husband and wife. Even though they have disagreements, we still see a love. "You understand?"

George Tillman Jr. narrates a sequence from his film where Maverick, played by Russell Hornsby, teaches his children how to behave around the police. Credit Credit... 20th Century Fox

The Hate U Give

Directed by George Tillman Jr.

Crime, Drama

PG-13

2h 12m

The rapper Tupac Shakur once broke down the acronym for his mantra "T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E.": "The hate you gave little infants [expletive] everybody," he said of systematic injustices. "What you feed us as seeds, grows and blows up in your face." More than two decades after his death, his message was worked into "The Hate U Give," Angie Thomas's best-selling 2017 novel about a black teenager who experiences those inequalities firsthand.

"Pac's gonna always be relevant," Khalil (Algee Smith) insists to his childhood friend Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg) in this uneven film adaptation directed by George Tillman Jr. Moments later, Khalil will be dead, shot by a jittery white police officer who pulls them over and mistakes his hairbrush for a gun.

The messy thing about relevancy is that sometimes it means not enough has changed for the better. One way to reckon with this fact is through art - which is why, as more black artists have gotten behind the camera and entered the writers' room, the police brutality narrative has almost become a genre unto itself. Some recent works, like "Queen Sugar," the TV series created by Ava DuVernay, and Solange Knowles's 2016 album, "A Seat at the Table," have been better than others at exploring the psychological toll of that brutality with care and nuance. Mr. Tillman's "The Hate U Give" (with a screenplay by Audrey Wells) lies somewhere in the middle.

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Amandla Stenberg in the film adaptation of Angie Thomas's best-selling book, "The Hate U Give." Credit... Erika Doss/Twentieth Century Fox

The film opens with a powerful affirmation of blackness, both in the beauty of it and the burden. In voice-over, Starr recalls her father, Maverick (Russell Hornsby, excellent), giving " The Talk," a familiar rite of passage for many black Americans about navigating (and surviving) a predominantly white world, to her younger self and two brothers. He wants to instill in them a sense of pride and the tenets of the Black Panther Party's Ten-Point Program.

Video

A preview of the film.

As a teenager, Starr is a sneakerhead who uncomfortably straddles opposing worlds - Garden Heights, a predominantly black and lower-income neighborhood, is the place she's always called home; Williamson Prep, a fancy predominantly white private school, is where she and her siblings, Seven (Lamar Johnson) and Sekani (TJ Wright), attend school. She works hard every day to keep them separate, hiding her white boyfriend, Chris (K.J. Apa), from her father, while policing her own appearance and actions at school. Black vernacular makes her white classmates cool, she observes. "Slang makes me 'hood.'"

Her code switching is the most intriguing story line here, partly because young black female protagonists in popular culture are still few and far between. (A majority of recent films and TV shows starring black characters, like "Insecure" and the "She's Gotta Have It" TV remake, have focused on 20- and 30-somethings.) Ms. Stenberg strikingly embodies Starr's dichotomies - self-doubt and bouts of confidence; introversion and outspokenness - but the film's driving plot is Khalil's death and how it pushes Starr to come into her own as an activist.

Yet the script struggles to effectively weave this all together with the kind of thoughtful complexity that Ms. Thomas brought to her young-adult novel. Mr. Apa's Chris, for instance, makes for a bland if earnestly supportive boyfriend, and the film glosses over his troublesome recitation of the tired axiom "I don't see color" when expressing his disappointment with how Starr has kept her connection to the shooting a secret.

Russell Hornsby, Regina Hall, Ms. Stenberg and Common in "The Hate u Give," directed by George Tillman Jr. Credit... Erika Doss/Twentieth Century Fox

Elsewhere, the rapper Common has a small role as Starr's uncle Carlos, a police officer. There's only a vague understanding of the tension that comes with being in such a position, condensed to a conversation late in the film in which he defends police shootings to Starr by explaining what an officer might be thinking when interacting with a civilian. Thankfully the moment doesn't end on a #BlueLivesMatter note, though it comes close. But it's a missed opportunity; after a succinct rebuttal from Starr, the plot pushes on.

That's the other thing about cultural relevancy - if you rely on it too much at the expense of deep characterization, you'll barely scratch the surface. Ms. Stenberg, Mr. Hornsby and others in the ensemble (including Regina Hall as Starr's mother, Lisa) are more than capable of exploring their characters' depths, but a wonky script gets them only so far.

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Review: In 'The Hate U Give,' a Police Shooting Forces a Teen to Find Her Voice (Published 2018)

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The Hate U Give Directed by George Tillman Jr. Crime, Drama PG-13 2h 12m The rapper Tupac Shakur once broke down the acronym for his mantra "T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E.": "The hate you gave little infants [expletive] everybody," he said of systematic injustices. "What you feed us as seeds, grows and blows up in your face."

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This book is about a young girl caught in the middle of two completely different worlds.
This powerful drama is based on a young adult novel by Angie Thomas.
Star,  the main character, witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood friend (the second one she has seen). Now, she must find her voice and stand up for what's right.