Name: Retro Film Review: Rosewood (1997)
Item: Rosewood
Rating: 70
Author: @drax

(source:tmdb.org)

When asked about the worst examples of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the past decade, most Americans, and, to be fair, most people in the world, would answer with words like "Kosovo" and "Bosnia". Very few would mention "Rwanda", and this is hardly surprising – in the American (and, therefore, global) worldview, genocide is not genocide if it doesn't happen to white people. All that could be explained by a self-perpetuating cycle of racism, prejudice, embarrassment, and denial. This phenomenon is also responsible for covering up and ignoring some of the similar incidents from the American past. One of those incidents is the subject of Rosewood, a 1997 drama by the black American director John Singleton.

In the early 1920s, a small Florida town called Rosewood had an all-black population. Its residents had put their skills and working habits to good use, creating relative prosperity for their community. The people of Sumner, the neighbouring white community, were getting increasingly envious of Rosewood, and that envy didn't take much to escalate into racial hatred. The tension increases with the arrival of Mann (played by Ving Rhames), a mysterious black rider rumoured to be an escaped convict. The trouble begins on the last day of 1922 when a white woman from Sumner accuses an unknown black man of assault. Sheriff Walker (played by Michael Rooker) organises a posse, but, despite his best efforts, this posse, fuelled by wild rumours, quickly transforms into a lynch mob determined to exterminate any black man, woman, or child it can lay its hands on. Their murderous rampage brings them to Rosewood, where they engage in torching houses, torture, and mass slaughter. Surviving blacks hide in the woods, where they are hunted like wild animals. John Wright (played by Jon Voight), Rosewood's store owner and the only white resident, has enough humanity in himself to arrange for a train that would bring blacks to safety. Mann returns to Rosewood to assist him in his humanitarian mission.

Accounts – official and unofficial – widely differ on the actual number of people killed in Rosewood; some claim half a dozen, others claim dozens or even hundreds of people. Beyond doubt is that Rosewood, following those events, ceased to exist. What followed is seven decades of silence; whites kept it out of embarrassment, blacks feared reprisals. That allowed screenwriter Gregory Poirier and John Singleton enough creative freedom to reconstruct those events with a combination of fact and plausible fiction. Ironically, the ending of Rosewood – that features scenes more suitable to westerns than to a film like Schindler's List – looks more like a script invention, but is actually based on fact. The product of the film makers' fiction is the character of Mann – mysterious, educated, and relatively prosperous black veteran of WW1. He is wonderfully played by Ving Rhames, an actor displaying charisma and presence that could match his performance in Pulp Fiction. Jon Voight, whose character is based on fact, is also effective as a man who, in the most difficult circumstances, is able to overcome his own racial prejudices. Michael Rooker gives another great performance as a lawman tragically torn between doing his duty and succumbing to mob instincts. The most chilling performance is by Bruce McGill, who plays the most distinguished among many homicidal racists featured in this film.

The best thing about Rosewood is the way it goes beyond the usual simplistic display of inter-racial relations. Instead of simply stating that racism is bad, Singleton tries to explain it through characters, which are multidimensional and believable, regardless of their race. Poirier shows how the racist pogrom had its roots both in the envy felt by poor whites and in the long tradition of racism that is passed from generation to generation. Scenes in which a father shows a little son how blacks are to be hanged and murdered are among the most chilling in recent memory, easily rivalling the most heart-wrenching scenes in Schindler's List, The Pianist, and other Holocaust films. The effect is even more disturbing because the audience knows that, unlike the Holocaust, the Rosewood pogrom is not a relatively brief historical incident but part of a pattern that lasted for decades before and after the events shown in the film. Those scenes also show how this film has universal value – what happened in Rosewood would, in other forms, continue to happen in various parts of the world, with people seemingly completely similar in appearance, customs, and culture finding convenient reasons to hate and murder each other. The broader political context of the events around Rosewood isn't handled well, and, unlike Schindler's List, this too often looks like a Hollywood film rather than a recreation of history. But, whether it is a docudrama or fiction, Rosewood would undoubtedly serve its purpose by making the audience think about the unpleasant lessons of the past.

RATING: 7/10 (+++)

(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.films.reviews on December 23rd 2003)