A close-knit Chicago family, with few resources and faltering dreams, struggles with their sense of home in writer-director Minhal Baig's plaintive indie drama “We Grown Now.” Set in the high-rises of the Cabrini-Green housing project in 1992, when the decline of the beleaguered complex was palpable, it sounds like a recipe for a grim look at poverty. But in the solid hands of Windy City native Baig, it's a decidedly poetic, sometimes even golden, portrait of lives unafraid to have hope in the midst of growing despair.
Our entry is through our best friends from grade school, Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez), energetic kids driven by a love of exploration (sometimes during school hours), commitment of perfecting their “jump” on the playground on stacked mattresses. drawn from empty drives and a running commentary of Bulls jokes, mockery and analysis. (This is the rare period film that lacks musical cues, and Baig prefers Jay Wadley's flint-string score as an accompaniment.)
Malik, who boasts a smile you wish you had more of, is also an active dreamer, determined to show Eric (whose outlook can become cynical, despite an attentive single father (Lil Rel Howery) who pressures him academically) how the spots on a The ceiling could be a constellation of stars. And with a little help from the wonder and warmth of Pat Scola's childhood perspective cinematography and the calm, confident performances of the young leads, we can see it too.
Institutional abandonment is not hidden. It's just that human closeness reigns. In their modest, comfortable apartment, Malik and his younger sister receive unwavering love, support and wisdom from their working mother Dolores (Jurnee Smollett) and their grandmother Anita (a sublime matriarchal S. Epatha Merkerson), whose elegant window curtains, made when he first moved to Cabrini-Green decades ago from inhospitable Mississippi, they are a source of beautification.
A scene from the movie “We Grown Now.”
(Danielle Scruggs/Sony Pictures Classics)
Yet not even this multigenerational Black family's well-tended sanctuary is immune from worsening neighborhood safety and the overreach of a demonizing municipal authority. When a 7-year-old child is the victim of gun violence on the way to school (the real-life case of Dantrell Davis, whose 1992 murder galvanized the city), resident ID cards suddenly become a requirement, followed of an unnecessarily dehumanizing police force. raids. All of this smacks of unworthy punishment for being a problem area under Mayor Richard Daley.
The key to Baig's balance between coming-of-age energy and realism is a pivotal sequence. It begins with the kids skipping school for an epic, joyous trip to the city's Art Institute, which includes a wide-eyed introduction to Walter Ellison's bustling 1935 painting “Train Station,” which depicts white vacationers in one platform and black travelers uprooting their lives on another. The day's euphoria is short-lived, however, when Malik returns home and is confronted by a terrified mother, whose tears and anger lash out, suggesting that her growing worry and her son's boundless taste for freedom will soon become incompatible. (Credit goes to Smollett's painful illustration of what exhaustion on top of exhaustion looks like in a single mother.)
Later, when a practical solution to the home's discomfort is presented, the film's not always subtle but carefully crafted themes of security and mobility take on a poignant intensity. We see how the harsh lessons of Grandma Anita's Great Migration finally register with a mother and son who have only known one nest. And in Malik's case, it's a nest strengthened by an unbreakable friendship he can't imagine losing.
Of course, the truth that looms over this sweet, sad story, the product of Baig's prodigious research, is that Cabrini-Green, its last building demolished in 2011, is itself just a memory of the community. An ancient dream of civic progress, it kept the residents who made it their home for as long as possible. In his sincerity of vision, “We Grown Now” is a loving testimony to them.
'Now we have grown up'
Classification: PG, for thematic material and language.
Execution time: 1 hour, 33 minutes
Playing: Opens Friday, April 19 at AMC Century City, Cinemark Baldwin Hills
