Belly

Ten years ago, I taught briefly at a South Side Chicago charter high school whose student body was made up 100% of African-American students who wanted to improve their lives. I know I learned a lot more from them than they learned from me. In talking about movies, they brought my attention repeatedly to a recent film called Belly, which they said was "the real deal," not "the usual junk." It took me a long time to catch up with the film, but my students were quite correct about it; and it is greatly to be regretted that writer-director Hype Williams has not made another feature, although he remains active (and much sought after) in the music video world.

Belly was not, it's fair to say, well understood when it appeared in 1998. Reviewers took it to task for simultaneously glamorizing and moralizing about the "gangsta lifestyle," as if that uneasy mix had not been a feature of all gangster films going back to D.W. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley in 1912. I am struck, indeed, by how comparable Belly is to an early sound film gangster classic such as The Public Enemy (1931). Putting them head-to-head, if you dock Belly a few points for narrative incoherence and for not having a lead performance quite as strong as James Cagney's, but then add back all those points and more for Hype Williams's style, you can easily see that this film equals an acknowledged classic. That was scarcely acknowledged in 1998.

Shot for shot, Belly is an amazingly beautiful film to look at, every image strongly colored, brilliantly composed. As you might expect of an experienced music video maker, the editing and the soundtrack-to-visuals match are hypnotic. The language, admittedly, can be a little difficult to understand; this is one film whose DVD really ought to have offered English language subtitles, because the argot sometimes verges on the inscrutably private (as with British and Scottish gangster films). The often hilarious profanity does carry one along, though, as with a David Mamet play, or The Sopranos. In all these cases, as Leon Wieseltier noted of The Sopranos, the language is "cruelly inadequate" to the characters' needs, and therefore tragic as well as funny. In Belly, "fuck," "shit," and "nigger" are tortured to carry an awful lot of semantic weight, but it is impossible not to notice that a larger vocabulary would help work against a certain imprecision of communication. It is hard to have ideas when you don't have words to think them with, and conversely, when the ideas that you can have are shaped by the few words at your disposal, failure of imagination is one likely result. That sort of failure is certainly on display in Belly (although the secondary female characters suffer less from this than their men; they occupy a larger sympathetic universe).

But, refreshingly, Williams is not ultimately overly punitive with his two leads (played by Nas and DMX). In the end, he allows both of them epiphanies, and what appear to be escapes, although the departure of Nas's Sincere and his family is only spoken of, not seen, and is possibly contradicted by the accompanying images -- is he imagining it? That ambiguity lends beauty to the film's conclusion.     

I enjoyed Belly for its seriousness, its style, and its humor, which is saying much of any film. It is unique, both in general feel and in many specifics. This is the only movie in which you will ever see young gangsters watch excerpts of "Bunny Boy" in Harmony Korine's Gummo on a large-screen TV ("What is this shit?" one of them perplexedly asks); a great meta-movie collision, which I hope Williams and Korine had a good laugh over. This is also the only movie in which you will ever see a character named Knowledge played by an actor named Power, which I take to be a submerged point.