The Hate U Give

Dir: George Tillman Jr.

2018

**

I knew nothing about The Hate U Give before watching it but within minutes I knew that it must have been adapted from a ‘Young adult’ novel. When I was a ‘young adult’ I was reading George Orwell, Charles Dickins, Ray Bradbury, William Golding, Joseph Heller before moving onto Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, Charles Bukowski, while still keeping Sue Townsend close to my heart. ‘Young adult’ literature is a pretty meaningless term, if not a little insulting to young adults. The common factor that I’ve noticed in this nonsensical genre is just how contrived they all are. The Hate U Give explores many important issues but spreads the story way too thin and complicates each subject when it should have just concentrated on one. I think the subject is so important, for children as well as adults – young or old – but it is told so heavy-handedly that I found it far to big to swallow. It’s not just contrived, it is also full of awful stereotype and woeful cliché. It’s like every great film and every beautifully written book based on the subject of racism and equality had been concentrated, shoved down ones throat and then vomited into the camera. If you overpower the flavour, you ruin the meal. This is such an important theme and I feel it was criminally wasted on this film. The story follows 16-year-old Starr Carter, a black girl who lives in a black neighbourhood but attends a white private school along with her brother. The film focuses on the double life she feels she is leading, never feeling quite herself with her black friends or her white school friends. After a gun goes off at a party Starr is attending with her friend Kenya, she is driven home by her childhood best friend, Khalil who reveals his attraction to her. While driving home, they are stopped by a white police officer. The officer tells Khalil, who is black, to exit the car and while he stands with his hands on the roof, he plays it cool and reaches through the driver-side window to check on Starr and picks up a hairbrush lying on the seat. The white officer sees Khalil has an object in his hand and fires three shots at him, killing him. Starr cradles him in her arms as the officer discovers that Khalil had a hairbrush, not a gun. Khalil's death becomes a national news story. Starr's identity as the witness is initially kept secret from about everyone outside Starr's family – leaving Starr's two best friends, Hailey Grant and Maya Yang, and Starr's white boyfriend, Chris, who all attend Williamson Prep together, all unaware of Starr's connection to the news story. Having to keep this secret weighs on her, as does her need to keep her school and home personas separate. Starr agrees to be interviewed on television and to testify in front of a grand jury after being encouraged by a civil rights lawyer, April Ofrah (who is surely a take on Oprah Winfrey?). While defending Khalil's character during her interview, in which her identity is hidden, she names the King Lords, the gang that controls her neighborhood. The gang retaliates by threatening Starr and her family, forcing them to move in with her Uncle Carlos, who is also a detective. Carlos was a father figure to Starr when her father, Maverick, spent three years in prison for gang activity. Following his release, Maverick left the gang and became the owner of the Garden Heights grocery store where Starr and her half-brother Seven work. Maverick was only allowed to leave the King Lords because his false confession to a crime kept gang leader King from being locked up. King, widely feared in the neighborhood, now lives with Seven's mother and Seven's half-sister Kenya, who is friends with Starr. After a grand jury fails to indict the white officer, Garden Heights erupts into both peaceful protests and riots. The failure of the criminal justice system to hold the officer accountable pushes Starr to take an increasingly public role, including speaking out during the protests, which are met by police in riot gear. Her increasing identification with the people of Garden Heights causes tension with Starr's school friends and especially with her boyfriend Chris. Starr and Maya eventually start standing up to Hailey's comments but Chris remains supportive of Starr. After the rioting, Starr and Seven get trapped in Maverick's grocery store, which is fire-bombed by King and his gang. The two escape with the help of Maverick and some other Garden Heights business owners. When the police arrive, Starr's younger brother Sekani, who is only around 9 years old, points a gun at King. Starr defuses the situation by standing between both of them and in line with the gun. The community stands up against the King, who eventually goes to jail. Starr eventually promises to keep Khalil's memory alive and to continue her advocacy against injustice. What started out as an interesting idea, soon descends into parody. It’s such a shame. Amandla Stenberg is a brilliant young actor who gives everything to her performance but it is almost like she’s been treated like a show dog, running in and out of tunnels and jumping through hoops. Exploring the differences between the black neighbourhood and the white middle-class school should have been enough. If the film was meant to be about a white officer shooting an unarmed black man then that is what the film should have focused on. The whole gang thing was unnecessary in this story. The depiction of blacks and whites was incredibly two-dimensional, the villains on both sides looking like poor imitations of characters seen in much better films. One of the best films in the last decade on race and inequality came out two months before (Blindspotting) and The Hate U Give is a far cry from Fruitvale Station which was released five years before that. Dear White People was also a bold and striking film that we need more of. I would argue that Blindspotting is best suited for my generation but Fruitvale Station, being a true story, is exactly the sort of thing ‘young adults’ should be watching. The characters and events in The Hate U Give are beyond contrived, every ingredient is thrown at it without thought or refinement. I think it could have been far more effective if the events weren’t so spoon fed to the audience and quite frankly, it needed to show more racism. It felt like it tip-toed around the subject a bit, which I understand, but in Trump’s America, maybe it needed to really tell it how it is, us non-racist White people would be behind that. In the end it is the black criminal who is locked up but not the white officer. Nothing is really said about this, and I think it’s a huge omission and a bit shocking that a black author and a black director didn’t do anything about it. I really don’t want to talk ill of the dead, and it was incredibly sad that Audrey Wells’ died just before the film was released, but  her style of writing was totally inappropriate for the seriousness of the content, although the original story was already flawed. Such a wasted opportunity, luckily there are far better and more powerful films out there that explore the same subjects, I just hope the ‘young adults’ see them too.