Film critics, especially the kind that make Important Lists, typically overcorrect for recency bias, which I respect. You can never be too sure something that seems groundbreaking now will still feel that way in a generation, and it’s just as easily to dismiss something that ends up being iconic. This Criterion Month I’ve been thinking about François Truffaut a lot and the importance of his debut, The 400 Blows. A towering achievement, especially as a directorial debut, Truffaut’s coming-of-age story is often discussed as one of the greatest films of all time.
Boyz n the Hood is older now than The 400 Blows was when Boyz n the Hood came out in 1991. I think that’s why Criterion recently released his Hood Trilogy box set, enough time has passed that you can talk about both these movies in the same breath. But what do I know? I just saw it. Maybe it’s too soon for me to be making declarations.
In South Central Los Angeles, the precocious 10-year-old Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.) gets in a fight with another boy in class after his teacher makes some really provocative decisions. His single mother, Reva (Angela Bassett), who is busy with both work and grad school, decides to move Tre in with his strict but attentive father, Furious (Laurence Fishburne), in the Crenshaw neighborhood.
Seven years later, Tre (now Cuba Gooding Jr. in his film debut), is mature, responsible, and college-bound. Lately, he’s preoccupied with his girlfriend, Brandi’s (Nia Long) religious reservations about having sex before marriage, bringing up his insecurities about his virginity and his nervousness about losing it.
Meanwhile, Tre’s best friend, Ricky (Morris Chestnut), has grown up to be every bit the football star he promised to be when he was a kid. A recruiter from USC comes to visit his family and invites Ricky to come visit the campus. It sounds like a scholarship is all but guaranteed, as long as Ricky can at least score a 700 on the SAT.
Ricky’s brother, Doughboy (Ice Cube, another cinematic debut and the writer of the song for which the film is named), just got out of prison. He’s on a totally different trajectory from Tre and Ricky: while they’re both on their way out of the neighborhood, Doughboy dropped out of high school and become a drug dealer. He projects a lot of strength and wisdom (he says all he could do in prison was work out and read) but clearly is deeply insecure about his mother’s (Tyra Ferrell) obvious preference for Ricky.
Boyz n the Hood follows the lives of these three young men and the people who matter most to them without really being a straightforward narrative about anything except all the frustration, adventure, and tragedy that comes with growing up in a tough place with the deck stacked against you.
It’s funny how much of Boyz n the Hood I had absorbed through cultural osmosis and how much I still didn’t know. For one, Boyz n the Hood explicitly riffs on Stand by Me throughout, something I had never heard anyone talk about but was obvious enough it’s even in the Wikipedia. But my biggest surprise was that Laurence Fishburne was playing the actual father Cuba Gooding Jr. and not just a father figure or mentor. I had seen clips of his performance many times, but he’s so close to the same age as Cuba it never occurred to me he’d literally be playing his dad. But of course, that’s part of the story too – Furious and Reva had Tre when they were just 17, and that cycle repeats itself with Ricky already having a toddler at the same age.
Speaking of growing up fast, John Singleton was nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars, setting records as both the youngest — he was just 24 — and first African American director to be nominated. Despite that, by having not seen the Hood Trilogy films, I thought he was an action director. Singleton was always in my mind the guy who made 2 Fast 2 Furious, Four Brothers, and the first Shaft remake. I had no idea this would be such an emotional experience! It makes it an even bigger bummer to me now that he died back in 2019 and his last theatrical film was Taylor Lautner thriller Abduction. Before he died, he was doing well in TV though, having reunited with Cuba Gooding Jr. when he directed an episode of The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story and co-creating the quietly great Snowfall for FX. Like so many of the characters in Boyz n the Hood, I would have liked to see what more he could have done if he was given more time.