Amongst all the opposite issues that it’s, “Rob Peace” is a portrait of a sort of extraordinary particular person whose prodigious items are yoked into service by those that haven’t got such blessings. Rob’s father is the primary instance. Watch how he goes from being tearfully grateful for his son’s assist to seeming like he feels entitled to it, and making the lad really feel responsible for not spending each waking second residing for his pop. However Rob can be a beacon of what is doable for neighbors, lecturers, and highschool and college classmates (he has the uncommon skill to attract individuals from quite a lot of completely different demographics collectively to occasion). There is a even a subplot about Rob and a few his associates realizing there’s cash to be made in shopping for and “flipping” homes, to make a bit of cash off the gentrification that began reworking a city neighborhoods after the flip of the millennium, together with East Orange’s and Newark’s. Rob’s acquired the imaginative and prescient, however he additionally has the abilities. It quickly turns into obvious that the abilities helped give him the imaginative and prescient. You see this concept expressed even in little moments, like when Jackie and Rob have a budgeting discuss and she or he reflexively has him do the maths.
“Rob Peace” is an formidable, most likely overstuffed film that tries to pack an eventful life and all of its wider implications into two hours; it might simply have run three, or been reimagined as a TV miniseries. Some parts really feel truncated or skipped-over. However that is the character of the venture—one other tragic inevitability, possibly. (Outdated film biographies used to have the ability to get away with specializing in the highlights of a life: they’d offer you 20 minutes on a personality’s childhood, then glimpses of three or 4 distinct components of their existence, then wrap issues up and roll the credit, and in some way no person within the viewers felt cheated.)
“Rob Peace” is stylistically out-of-step in one other means: it is a populist work geared toward a large viewers. It is a disgrace that motion pictures like this not get mainstream theatrical distribution (except they star Will Smith—and even then it is a cube roll) as a result of it appears to have been made with viewers reactions in thoughts. Ejiofor’s course and Masahiro Hirakubo’s enhancing depart area for laughs, tears, gasps, and side-talk. There are moments the place Rob is knocked down by a problem, overcomes adversity, or makes what we all know is an enormous mistake although he does not notice it the time, and also you simply know you’d be capable to really feel the collective connection to the fabric at a mobile stage if you happen to had been in a crowded theater.
The very best factor about this film, although, is that it by no means holds your hand and tells you that if a sure character feels a method about one thing and you are feeling in another way, you are in some way “watching it unsuitable.” If something, “Rob Peace” errs on the facet of telling you that you’ll come out of this film feeling as if you happen to’ve seen a narrative that does not match into one field, and even a number of packing containers, as a result of no person’s life does.
