Movie review: 'Notorious'

Notorious: Drama. Directed by George Tillman Jr. Starring Jamal Woolard, Derek Luke, Angela Bassett. (R. 120 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)
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Jamal Woolard plays Brooklyn native Chris Wallace, a.k.a....Derek Luke (left) and Jamal Woolard as the Notorious B.I.... View Larger Images




It must have been an act of great restraint for Sean Combs to resist titling this film, about Chris Wallace, his close friend turned rapper and cultural icon, "The Notorious B.I.G. - The Sean Combs Story."

If there is one take-away from this fawning bio-pic, which Combs executive produced, it's that Sean "Puffy/Puff Daddy/P.Diddy/Diddy" Combs is a visionary who played a critical role at every point in Wallace's brief career.

Combs discovered the Brooklyn teenager and gave him the option of slinging crack in the streets or slinging raps in the studio. Combs, of course, was also the lone believer in Wallace's talent, and it was Combs - despite the cackles of Wallace's gangsta posse - who suggested Wallace record what would become his soft-tempo anthem, "Juicy."

It was Combs - wouldn't you know - who guided Wallace with life-changing platitudes ("You can't change the world until you change yourself"); it was Combs who gave Wallace the backbone to perform onstage in Los Angeles despite rival Death Row Records crew members lurking in the audience; and it Combs who cradled Wallace in his arms on the way to the hospital after the rapper was shot down in Los Angeles in March 1997.

And it was Combs - oh yes, we could do this all day - who, in an otherwise moving funeral scene, leaned over to mother Voletta Wallace (played by a superb Angela Bassett) and offered to do "anything - anything at all," which leads to Wallace's triumphant casket ride through the streets of Bed-Stuy.

The problem with this telling of Wallace's life is that while the filmmakers are busy making a vanity project, they forget to show why Wallace was such a unique talent and in what cultural context his raps flourished. Some concert scenes suggest the filmmakers were concerned about whether this would be a film you could dance to, which it certainly is. It's also a perfectly serviceable rise-and-fall gangster flick, with all the sepia tone one could hope for.

But it mostly makes a strong case for third-party detachment in story-telling. Perhaps there should be a new artistic commandment, the 15-5 rule: If you want to portray a rapper or artist on the big screen, you've got to wait 15 years from the subject's death, and live at least five degrees of separation from the subject. It'll help limit the hagiography.

In "Notorious," Combs, Voletta Wallace and two of Wallace's former managers serve as producers. Wallace's real-life son plays his father as a nerdy schoolboy. While one scene shows Wallace's violence against wife Faith Evans (and no mention of his arrests for assault), Wallace's transgressions as a human being - selling crack to pregnant women; rampant infidelity; letting a friend take the fall for a weapons charge and a three-year prison stint in Wallace's name - are all meant to show us that while the Big Poppa had his flaws, he was really just an irresistible lug among friends.

(About the whole West Coast-East Coast rivalry thing: According to this film, it was a myth born from Tupac Shakur's paranoia, then perpetuated by the media, and angrily disavowed by both Combs and Wallace. Still, it's a real enough entity to serve as the prime suspect in Wallace's murder.)

Wallace is played straight by first-timer Jamal Woolard, a ringer who gets the mannerisms and nasal huffing correct while portraying the character as a big-time charmer, in the deluxe. Wallace was an honor student with a playful wit, but in his teens turned to drug dealing for nothing more than a sudden "addiction to the paper." There's no sincere explanation for what drove such a good (and apparently doted on) kid to become an angry, pistol-whipping thug, who's relatively ruthless deep into his adulthood.

In a scene meant to show Wallace's growth as a man just before his death, the author of such songs as "Me & My Bitch" sits his young daughter on his lap and orders her to never let a man call her the b-word. It's a rich moment: Did Wallace get to age 24 and father two children before he realized "bitch" was a disrespectful term? Or did the filmmakers have to add that scene to humanize their friend?

Wallace's music surely meant something lasting to his fans. It did more than make people dance, and it was more than an artful examination of "life on the streets," a theme well-mined by rappers long before him. Yet Combs fails to show what made his former employee's rhymes speak to so many.




"My son told stories," Voletta Wallace's character says in a voiceover.

All rappers tell stories. But what was so special about Chris Wallace's, other than they appeared on Combs' record label?