Fractured Mirror 2.0 #2 Baadasssss (2001)

Mario Van Peebles made a film debut in the thunderously influential 1971 cult classic Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song unlike any other. That is a good thing if, like me, you’re of the mindset that people only entering their teen years should not be filming sex scenes, no matter how revolutionary or provocative the context.

When writer-director-star Melvin Van Peebles needed a child actor to play the titular character in a scene where he loses virginity while still essentially a child, he picked his own reticent son for the role, against the wishes of some folks who understandably worried that this was still further proof that the eccentric filmmaker had finally gone mad and was making what was less a movie than a potential crime.

Mario Van Peebles’ onscreen debut was an auspicious beginning to a fairly inauspicious career as a journeyman actor and director. Van Peebles’ directorial debut, the blindingly slick, flashy crime thriller New Jack City promised big things the actor-director and writer’s subsequent career never quite followed through on.

Van Peebles used the leverage New Jack City’s groundbreaking success gave him to make dream projects like Panther and Posse, a revisionist western that reinvented the western along blaxploitation lines but the results were neither critical nor commercial successes. Van Peebles’ subsequent career was filled with more downs than ups, with TV movies and direct-to-DVD cheapies replacing theatrically releases vehicles.

Van Peebles had one story, however, that he was clearly dying to tell. He had one story that mattered to him more than all the others. He had one role that he was quite literally born to play, that qualified as something close to his birthright. It was Mario Van Peebles’ destiny to tell Melvin Van Peebles’ story as well as his own by chronicling the rough, raw, ragged and unlikely production of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassssss Song, a cinematic howl of rage from a man pushed past the breaking point that played a huge role in launching the intertwined and overlapping cultural forces of hip hop and blaxploitation.

Mario’s 2003 biopic Baadasssss! is first and foremost an act of devotion from a son understandably bursting with pride and love for a father whose extraordinary accomplishments and gifts have not been sufficiently recognized by white America, or even black America, for that matter. Melvin was just too eccentric, too raw and too original to be palatable for the masses. He would forever be a cult figure operating on the fringes and inspiring fellow mad geniuses like producer Madlib, who made Van Peebles’ music the centerpiece of The Unseen, the timeless masterpiece he released under his Quasimoto alter-ego.

If Melvin was a mad genius his son is more of a slick entertainer. Baadasssss! feels less like raw truth than a glibly enjoyable, thoroughly cheesy television movie full of hackneyed cultural signifiers, broad caricatures and a distractingly star-filled supporting cast filled with such goofy white folks as Adam West, Saul Rubinek, Vincent Shiavelli, Sally Struthers and perhaps most distractingly, a pre-fame Rainn Wilson as Melvin’s creative partner, a dude who gets laid by a multi-cultural coalition of hot women despite looking like a young Rainn Wilson with glasses, tie-died shirts and hippie hair.

Van Peebles gets fun, colorful supporting turns from David Alan Grier and a very young Terry Crews as a wall of muscles with a giant afro, an imposing swagger and a big heart and Joy Bryant and Nia Long are magnetic as Melvin’s sexy, attention-seeking secretary and Mevlin’s supportive girlfriend, respectively, but the women in the movie exist solely to serve Melvin.

The film’s storytelling is equally clumsy. It’s the sort of film that doles out the exposition that Van Peebles clashed with the studio over the ending of his previous film Watermelon Man, which wanted a racist happy ending Van Peebles nixed, by having Rubinek’s character tell Melvin all about how he totally clashed with the studio over the racist original ending of Watermelon Man. I’m guessing since Melvin was there, living that experience and clashing with the studio firsthand, he probably did not need someone to remind him of what happened with Watermelon Man’s original ending.

Baadasssss! intermittently takes the form of a mockumentary as various larger than life figures from Van Peebles’ career and life take turns recounting to the camera what a stubborn, hard-headed, mercurial genius Melvin was and how he single-handedly changed the face and color of American film with a brazen provocation whose aftershocks are still being felt.

Yet Mario goes overboard in depicting his father not just as an overlooked pioneer and hero of the black power movement but something closer to the human embodiment of the black struggle, as blackness personified. The appeal of Sweetback lie in its presumed authenticity, in the idea that it presented black life as it actually was instead of watering it down for white audiences, some of which might be racist.

So there’s something a little perverse about Mario transforming the gritty raw material of his eccentric genius of a father’s attempts to recreate film in his own idiosyncratic image into a broad, goofy, aggressively assimilationist and multi-cultural crowd pleaser about a glowering black superman of an artist who just can’t help being better than everyone around him, tougher and smarter and more ferociously focused.

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song was an ego trip with a righteous socio-political bent. Melvin Van Peebles depicted himself as the ultimate revolutionary badass partially out of ego but also to give black audiences tired of seeing themselves in subservient and humiliating roles an opportunity to see someone who looked like them triumphing and being sexual and violent and right.

Melvin’s narcissism felt pointed and political and refreshing and new; when Mario shoots himself looking like a total badass riding his motorcycle, or in the company of the many gorgeous women in the film who throw themselves at him, however, it just feels like ego run amok. True, the film depicts the psychological collateral damage caused by Melvin’s reckless and righteous pursuit of artistic truth, but it’s invariably justified as being in the service of great art and personal and political liberation.

Considering the nature of the co-writer, director and star’s relationship with the material (no pun intended) it’s either surprising or to be expected that the most compelling and nuanced element of the film is Melvin’s tough-love bond with son Mario, played here by Khleo Thomas. The light-skinned Thomas isn’t just handsome: he’s downright pretty, with a soft afro and delicate features.

The young Mario is blessed and cursed to grow up in a great man’s outsized shadow and Thomas conveys how the young Mario reveres his father but also how he intimidates him to an almost frightening degree. In Melvin’s mind, he’s doling out the same tough love and gritty discipline that helped him become a man but there are times throughout the film when he goes too far and ends up hurting the people around him in the process.

Baadasssss! is most compelling as a Whiplash-like character study of how a true artist’s single-minded pursuit of his art can blind him to the emotions and needs of others. It’s most honest and revealing when its protagonist is at his angry and unyielding worst, when his mania to create makes him something approaching a madman. Yet the film is too committed to hagiography to ever knock its subject off the lofty pedestal it creates for him.

There are many elements of Baadasssss! that have not aged well, particularly the role Bill Cosby (T.K Carter, doing a pretty okay impersonation, but nothing more) plays in the proceedings as a saintly benefactor of the arts who comes in at a crucial moment with emergency funding to save the film.

And I’d love to be able to say that a sequence where the perpetually game Adam West, playing a flamboyant Hollywood big shot, proposes that he and Melvin take a little “dippety doo” in the pool before revealing his naked penis to a deeply unimpressed Melvin was an anomaly, but much of the film genuinely is pitched that broad, and not to its ultimate advantage.

In the end, Baadasssss! is ultimately little more than a footnote to Sweetback’s epic story, but as footnotes go, at least it’s a reasonably entertaining one, about a deserving subject that, alas, deserves a better, gutsier and less conventional film.

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