Can it honestly be declared that musicians make the worst actors? Probably not; after all, for sheer ineptitude, it’s hard to beat the smattering of athletes who have elected to test out their thespian abilities over the years. (Anybody see Joe Namath in Avalanche Express, or Bruce Jenner in Can’t Stop the Music?) But when it comes to celebrities in another field repeatedly trying to make their mark in the movies, it’s the musicians who perpetually strike out.
For every music star with natural screen charisma and some semblance of acting chops — say, Kris Kristofferson or David Bowie — there are far more who manage to humiliate themselves with their wretched line deliveries, misplaced emotions and deer-in-the-headlights demeanor. For starters, take Mariah Carrey in Glitter, Sting in Dune and Madonna in just about anything. And even when these melody makers are basically playing loose versions of themselves, it’s clear that they’re not able to translate their smooth moves from the stage (and recording studio) onto the screen. During Purple Rain’s exhilarating concert scenes, Prince was positively on fire, but whenever the beat stopped and he had to, like, actually speak to the other characters… well, even a first-grader playing Willy Loman would have more credibility.
At first glance, 8 Mile would appear to be Eminem’s Purple Rain, a blatant attempt by a music star to broaden his fan base by appearing before the movie-going multitudes in a ragtag effort consisting primarily of sizzling concert scenes surrounded by tepid melodramatic moments. Yet 8 Mile confounds our expectations from the start. When we first see Eminem’s character, a Detroit nowhereman named Jimmy “Rabbit” Smith Jr., he’s puking his guts out in a grungy bathroom stall. And in the following scene, when he initially takes the stage for a face-off against another rapper, he chokes; he freezes; he’s unable to utter one single syllable. From the start, then, it’s clear that 8 Mile is actually going to make an effort to be a bonafide motion picture and not just a soundtrack album with cinematic trimmings.
Not that this movie doesn’t have some connection to Purple Rain. Indeed, it harkens back to several films from the late 70s/early 80s that replaced the traditional glitz of the musical fantasy world with the grit of the real world, a place where creative expression wasn’t a luxury but rather a survival instinct, a possible escape from the lower rungs of a manmade hell. Films like Saturday Night Fever, Fame and Flashdance all share this view with Purple Rain and now 8 Mile — our lives may be miserable, their lower-working-class protagonists acknowledge, but we’re willing to bet that music will not only elevate our spirits but possibly also lift us right out of our dour physical surroundings. And what’s remarkable about most of these pictures is that they never promise their protagonists a rosy future by the fadeout, just the possibility of a rosy future.
As 8 Mile begins, there doesn’t seem to be hope for even that possibility. Not only does Jimmy choke on stage, he’s also recently broken up with his girlfriend and forced to move back home (i.e., a trailer) with his mom (Kim Basinger) and little sister. Mom is a character almost identical to the one played by Robin Wright Penn in White Oleander: a Southern-raised trailer-trash alcoholic who’ll do anything to prevent her latest boyfriend (in this case, a sleazebag portrayed by Michael Shannon) from taking off and leaving her without a man. Jimmy, for his part, works a dead-end factory job, though he at least has a core group of friends from which to draw support; chief among them is Future (Mekhi Phifer), who sees Jimmy’s potential as a rapper and continually encourages him to develop his skills. Jimmy receives further encouragement from two rather dubious sources: Wink (Eugene Byrd), a fast-talking huckster who insists he can land Jimmy a record deal in no time, and Alex (Brittany Murphy), a hot-to-trot party girl whose professed devotion to Jimmy quickly becomes suspect.
If you think this all somehow ends with Jimmy taking the stage to face off against the “hood’s top rapper, you’d be correct. Yet there’s too much grit and grime along the way for this to feel like a standard “underdog wins the day” movie. Working from a fairly decent script by Scott Silver, director Curtis Hanson (following up twin successes with L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys) milks this particular milieu for all it’s worth (8 Mile, incidentally, refers to the stretch of Detroit that largely separates the slums from the suburbs). This has to be one of the grungiest studio pictures to come down the pike recently — no surprise when one considers the cinematographer previously shot Amores Perros, the production designer handled Traffic, and one of the film editors cut Requiem for a Dream. Jimmy’s despair — as well as his desire to escape this place — is so palpable that as he builds up his rappin’ confidence throughout the course of the story, we begin to sense that he’s no longer stumbling around in complete darkness but rather has caught a glimpse of a faded “Exit” sign in the distance — a glimmer of hope, perhaps, but better than no hope at all. That the final rap battle feels so electrifying rather than merely coming across as the usual rah-rah climax taps directly into the energy emanating from Eminem as he gives his character a real presence. Forget the musicians’ curse this time around: This boy has enough acting smarts to pull this off (we’ll see how he fares in his follow-up feature, Richard III — just kidding!).
8 Mile is filled with nice touches along the way — for example, it’s no accident that a TV is shown airing 1959’s Imitation of Life, in which a black woman tries to integrate herself into white society; it can be stated that Eminem is doing the reverse — but it also suffers from some severe miscalculations. The bumbling antics of Jimmy’s friend Cheddar Bob (Evan Jones) eventually grow tiresome (this isn’t exactly the type of movie that cries out for incessant comic relief), and one character’s instantaneous reversal of fortune smacks of the worst kind of lazy plot contrivance. To be sure, 8 Mile has its share of potholes along the way, but overall it’s a sturdy motion picture, and it conclusively demonstrates that, for one movie at least, its star can go the distance.
This article appears in Nov 13-19, 2002.
