Nia DaCosta's Candyman: The Good Outweighs The Bad
For this little piece of real-estate I’ve carved out on the internet, I’ve been intentional about only highlighting things I like because it forces me to seek out things that bring me joy. That said, I’m writing tonight in response to a review that’s exhaustive in its critique of Nia DaCosta’s Candyman, which may seem counterproductive to this blog’s purpose, but many of the things the critic listed as issues for the film are actually things that I really enjoyed about it, and that I think make it a strong showing. So…multi-purpose! There are spoilers ahead so if you’ve not seen the movie yet and plan to, save this and come back to it later.
If you’re interested, the article I’m semi-responding to is by critic Robert Daniels for Polygon and you can read it here.
Diving in, one of the first posts I came across about the movie, immediately after seeing it was this:
I responded by saying I planned to go back to read the full piece, but that this was an odd expectation of a movie where Chicago is solely the setting (and clearly proxy for a larger issue) than it is a character in a way that cities can be and have been in other films. Thinking about much of Spike Lee’s career being a love letter to New York, or Issa Rae being intentional about her presentation of Black LA in Insecure, Chicago and Cabrini-Green in Candyman 2021 could have been many formerly-poor neighborhoods bordering any major city in the US and the only service that setting does for the film itself is continuity as the first, legitimate sequel to the original from 1992 (an adaptation itself). The main takeaway should have been the pervasive and slippery nature of gentrification, and how even the most formidable locales that Black people are relegated to and still find home in, cannot escape the reach of capitalism and the perceived value of a white population.
In the more fleshed-out version of that tweet, Robert talks about where Cabrini was situated in relation to the super-luxe neighborhood of Gold Coast and the juxtaposition of the beautiful Chicago skyline being visible from the row-houses of the poor and violent neighborhood. He belabors the point that he doesn’t feel like DaCosta did the work of conveying the economic disparity and why the city would seek to gentrify Cabrini, but in 2021 if someone is watching this film and not familiar with how these gentrification stories come to life, I think it is both unfair and unrealistic to expect that this film should change that. Something the film does well, almost as a direct counter to this critique, is very clearly spelling out (even if through direct exposition) how cities zone, rezone and facilitate the displacement of the people it made poor and the disappearing acts it does with the real-estate it only reluctantly allowed them to occupy in the first place. To further illustrate the poorness of these areas we’re all familiar with, or to make this about Cabrini itself would be to tell a different story entirely.
At multiple points, Robert makes comparisons between Nia’s work and Jordan Peele’s work (who wrote the story with Nia and Win Rosenfeld), claiming that Jordan’s own work is much “subtler” than the works he decides to extend his platform to. When I read this I thought, this can’t possibly be about the same Jordan Peele who built up the movie “Us” to have it climax in a sweeping monologue from the main character fumbling through a half-hearted explanation of what the movie had been about to that point. This simply is not about the same director who held a silent slave auction in “Get Out” or had the main character literally pick cotton as a call back to slaves picking cotton, to then shove it in his ears so he couldn’t be hypnotized and lobotomized by his white captors. Has the meaning of “subtle” changed recently?
Near the end of his review, Robert asks the following questions:
But what story does DaCosta want to tell? If this is a movie about the legend of Candyman, then why is he no more than an underutilized boogeyman? If this is about the residents of Cabrini-Green, then why not feature them or the area more heavily? Vanessa Estelle Williams reprises her role from the 1992 film, and considering the rich depth of her backstory — in the first movie, her baby was kidnapped by Candyman — it’s a wonder why this story wasn’t centered on her.
Reading this after having seen the movie, these questions feel so circular that it’s almost like he and his Chicago footwork are intentionally, and distractingly dancing around what is a very clear and direct point. The movie is about Candyman, yes, but as the vehicle that he’s incorrectly positioned Chicago as. The residents of Cabrini-Green, past and present, are proxies for how, whether in abject poverty or as well-to-do artists and gallery curators, Black people are fatally ill-equipped to go against the real boogeyman that is organized whiteness and it’s boundless resources to edge out anyone that’s not in the club. It’s about both the fluidity and rigidity of legends and how they endure over generations, able to impact and infect the minds of the very communities they were originally intended to scare, despite how that group (or members of that group) may change their station in life. For someone begrudging the intelligence level of the audience, or the skill of the story-teller, it’s shocking that he missed those things.
For just about every point made in his superfluous and long-winded review, there is a clear and shining example of why the takeaway is ill-placed, or is a personal preference of his that doesn’t actually make the story better. But instead of doing a line-by-line, I want to wrap up by challenging all critics, Black ones covering Black-led projects particularly, to really question the foundation of their critiques. The header for Robert’s piece is “The New Candyman Was Modernized For The Wrong Audience”, a declaration made without ever clearly identifying the audience it was modernized for, or the audience it should have reached. I won’t venture to assume the answers to either of those questions, but it lands in a larger discourse about who Black creators are talking to and for whom their content is intended.
For instance, works like Miss Juneteenth and Atlanta are unashamed of their specificity for Black viewers. But the greater benefit of broader representation in Hollywood is the benefit of choice. Which means a Nia DaCosta has the OPTION to tell a story like Candyman that’s helmed by Black creators, centers Black talent, is inarguably about race, but is not immediately recognizable as a “Black story” in the way that we’ve experienced them so far. In fact, Black creators telling more generalized stories, stories whose issues reach beyond Blackness, and swapping out generic white actors for new Black talent, allows us greater spectrums of humanity on screen. It widens the gap between heroism and villainy with more Black faces adding color, muscle and life to historically flat roles of minimal variation.
So I think Candyman was modernized for the younger audience that’s likely going to see it, and the movie-goers old enough to remember the themes of the original and see how the underlying message of that version remains the emotional core of this version. For those of us that understand that you can still go home and deal with the same bullshit even if the neighborhood looks a little, or a lot, different these days.
See Candyman if you can, safely. I really enjoyed it. And if you made it to the end of this, go read a really good review of Candyman by David Rooney for THR.