Review:
"Candyman"
Release Date: Aug. 27, 2021
Rating: R Running Time: 91 minutes “You can really make the story your own but some of the specifics should be somewhat consistent,” Colman Domingo’s William Burke says during a pivotal moment in co-writer/director Nia DaCosta’s revisiting of the seminal 1990s chiller Candyman. Burke is referring to the urban legend that keeps alive the memory of the terrifying supernatural entity that haunts Cabrini Green, the Chicago affordable housing project that has undergone near-total demolition since the 1992 release of director Bernard Rose’s adaptation of the Clive Barker short story, “The Forbidden.” But Burke could just as easily be addressing DaCosta’s Candyman. Her Candymanis not a remake or a spiritual sequel. It is a direct continuation of the Candymanstory that began in 1992 with Tony Todd’s slain artist Daniel Robitaille resurrected a century after his racially motivated death and commanding Virginia Madsen’s grad student Helen Lyle to “Be my victim.” Lyle’s presence is felt throughout DaCosta’s evocative recalibration of the Candyman urban legend, while another major character from the 1992 original is employed by DaCosta to connect both films with an essential way. (Another cameo, though, feels nothing more than an act of fan service.) While the first Candyman was unafraid to address the sociopolitical consequences of the black urban experience, it did so from the viewpoint of a privileged white woman with no direct knowledge of the hardships associated with the environment she sought to explore for her thesis on urban legends. Two subsequent slasher-styled sequels—set in New Orleans and Los Angeles, respectively—also offered young blonde white women as Candyman’s potential victims, with the twist that they were direct descendants of Robitaille. By taking the franchise back where it started, DaCosta—working from a script cowritten with producers Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld—definitively makes this story her own by reclaiming the urban legend for the black community and expanding upon the unifying themes of race and class that made the 1992 Candyman as thought-provoking as it was chilling. DaCosta overtly ties Candyman’s return to police brutality and racial bias with a justifiable rage that she controls until the final minutes of bloody mayhem. Her Candyman is not just a creation of a world filled with hate and cruelty but a solution to a form of racial intimidation that may never be solved in our lifetime. She opens Candyman with a flashback to 1977, when a preteen Burke witnesses the fatal police beating of Sherman Fields (Michael Hargrove), the prime suspect in the distribution of candy spiked with razor blades. Forty-two years later, Fields’ murder at the hands of police becomes the subject of a disturbing painting by Chicago artist Anthony McCoy (The Trial of the Chicago 7’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). McCoy, who lives and works in the now-generified Cabrini Green, possesses no knowledge of the Candyman until Burke informs him of the urban legend that connects Fields—known for wearing a hook on his amputated right hand—to Daniel Robitaille. McCoy’s growing fascination with the Candyman serves as a way for the restless, vengeful spirit to terrify a new generation of skeptics by appearing in the mirror when his name is uttered five times. “I feel really connected to this. I’ve never been this clear before. It’s like I know exactly what I should be doing right now,” McCoy tells his girlfriend, Brianna Cartwright (WandaVision’s Teyonah Parris), about his Candyman-inspired art. DaCostadoes not reveal the connection between McCoy and the Candyman until long after McCoy’s consumed by his work. But the connection is strong and remains both faithful to and soundly expands the franchise’s dark and tragic mythology. How much of McCoy’s fate is predetermined is open to debate. Abdul-Mateen plays up DaCosta’s presentation of McCoy of being a victim of his Candyman obsession by reveling in the flaws that make him a powerful artist with obvious narcissistic tendencies. Abdul-Mateen’s unexpected reaction to the news of a couple’s murder reveals McCoy’s priorities in a quiet but decisive manner. Oddly, though, DaCosta fails to draw any striking parallels between McCoy and Robitaille as artists beyond how the subject of their work changes their fortunes.Otherwise, DaCosta offers a slow descent into madness, one made distinct by John Guleserian’s desolate cinematography, Robert A. A. Lowe’s haunting score that recalls composer Philip Glass’ brooding contribution to the 1992 original, and the stark shadow puppetry by Manual Cinema employed to retell the events that led to the senseless deaths of Daniel Robitaille and Sherman Fields. DaCosta also orchestrates each Candyman appearance—cruel or otherwise—with purpose and ingenuity. However, DaCosta offers a bold but hastily executed climax that fails to adequately establish the villain’s true motive, resulting in a final confrontation between good and evil that seems forced under the circumstances regardless of how it reflects Candyman’s thematic concerns. But it does play into Candyman’s contention that not all monsters wear a hook. As with the 1992 original, DaCosta’s Candyman relies heavily on Cabrini Green to shape and to inform its harrowing turn of events. All that’s left of Cabrini Green today are its two-story rowhouses; the last of the high-rises apartment buildings were torn down in 2011. So DaCosta uses the gentrification of the neighborhood to further explore racial and economic inequality. To this end, the redeveloped Cabrini Green of DaCosta’s Candyman has a distinctly generic appearance. This is a Cabrini Green not just of Chicago but of Seattle, Philadelphia, and, especially, Austin. Every city struggling with the human cost of gentrification can see itself in Candyman. So when DaCosta returns to what remains of the forsaken Cabrini Green housing project, the unintended but inevitable impact of gentrification becomes abundantly clear. The empty streets of the housing project tell a story of a system set up to fail and/or exploit the most in need. By returning to Cabrini Green, DaCosta resummons Candyman as a physical manifestation of black pain. A black pain that is expressed with greater pronunciation and personal insight than it was back in 1992. Robert Sims Aired: Aug. 26, 2021 Web sites: https://www.candymanmovie.com https://www.facebook.com/CandymanMovie |
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