Directrospective: ROSEWOOD (1997)

Notes on the films of American director John Singleton.

All that remains of Rosewood, Florida after the white mob has gone.

ROSEWOOD is an outlier in John Singleton’s filmography. It’s his only film based on real events, his only period piece, his longest film, his lowest-grossing, and (if Hollywood accounting is to be trusted) his only film not to make back its production budget. It also ended several streaks in Singleton’s career to that point: it’s the first film he directed but did not also write, his first not set in California, his first not to be distributed by Columbia, and the first of only two Singleton films not to star any musicians.

When ROSEWOOD was released in February 1997, the event on which it is based, a racially-motivated 1923 massacre that killed an unspecified number of Black people (accounts vary from 25 to 150) and erased an entire majority-Black Florida town, had only been a matter of limited public knowledge for about a decade. While reported on at the time, official accounts downplayed the number of fatalities and no one was ever prosecuted. The massacre was so traumatic and the ensuing decades of continued anti-Black racism made justice seem so impossible that the survivors of Rosewood and their descendants never spoke about what happened, keeping silent for sixty years. It was only when a reporter published a story on Rosewood in the St. Petersburg Times in 1982, which story was picked up a year later by 60 Minutes, that people began to talk about the massacre again. Lawsuits and state legislative reports followed, and in 1994 Florida became the first U.S. state to compensate victims of racial violence when it awarded $1.5 million to the survivors of Rosewood and their descendants. By 1997, the story of Rosewood, Florida, a story not only of physical violence but of lasting psychological trauma and the process by which history is lost and found, was still a contemporary one.

The truly bizarre thing about the film ROSEWOOD, and to my mind its biggest failing, is that it completely ignores the second part of that story. Outside of some onscreen text in the film’s final seconds, you could sit through all 142 minutes of a historical epic about the town and never know anything of note happened after 1923. Despite the very dramatic ways in which the story was rediscovered and some justice finally attained - disputes as to the veracity of eyewitness accounts, accusations of fraud, a survivor slapping her adult son when she learned he talked to a reporter, a long battle for compensation that ended in an unprecedented act of government reparations - Singleton and writer Gregory Poirier choose instead to dramatize only the massacre itself, people the town with composites of historical residents, and focus much of the story on a fictional outsider. It’s possible to imagine a version of this film more akin to James Cameron’s TITANIC, interweaving the historical narrative with the contemporary investigation, or even Kurosawa’s RASHOMON, focusing on the difficulty of ever knowing what really happened. Part of the film’s purpose is to educate people about an incident of mass racial violence that had been forgotten; in leaving out the story of Rosewood’s erasure from history, they fail to fulfill that purpose.

It’s hard to know exactly why Singleton and Poirier opted to make ROSEWOOD the way they did, but I think it’s important to point out that both were outsiders to the story themselves. California native Singleton has been open about his unfamiliarity with and contempt for the American South prior to the film’s production. Poirier, a white man whose previous screenwriting credits were two motorcycle westerns, a sexploitation film, and a western about a sexy lady who rides a motorcycle, was born and raised on Maui. Small wonder, then, that their film’s hero (Ving Rhames) is a strong Man With No Name-type - well, in this case his name is “Mann” - who rides into town on a big horse, charming women with his good looks and manners and infuriating white men with his not-from-around-here refusal to be intimidated. While Rhames has incredible presence, as usual, and of course I want him to be my friend who protects me always, Mann is a comic book fantasy. He’s mysteriously wealthy, he has a near-telepathic connection with his beautiful horse, his neck is so muscular that he survives a lynching through sheer brute power. He’s unafraid to tell the white shop owner John Wright (Jon Voight) that he volunteered for World War I so that he could go to Europe to kill white people. Even the most heroic of Rosewood’s male residents, Sylvester Carrier (Don Cheadle), is a bit of a hothead who ultimately learns to trust Mann’s wise leadership. Mann allows the film to arrive at something like a happy ending following his daring rescue of many of Rosewood’s children by train, with the help of Wright. It feels like wish fulfillment, and it’s a shame considering they could have ended with the legal victory 70 years later. That’s a much more realistic model for the kind of justice that is possible now, living in the aftermath of a violent, racist past that many white people are happy to forget.

Watching all of Singleton’s films in a row, I’ve noticed a trend toward abstraction in his depiction of violence. BOYZ IN THE HOOD is bookended by direct calls to end gang violence, and its story builds to a climax that shows just how painful and destructive a single shooting can be for an entire neighborhood. When Doughboy gets revenge for his brother, it’s just as tragic and senseless as Ricky’s death was, and the cycle of destruction continues. POETIC JUSTICE is less directly concerned with violence, but Singleton takes time out of his romantic comedy-drama to highlight the emotional toll that two shooting deaths have had on the leads. In HIGHER LEARNING, he expands his storytelling scope significantly, and while its climactic mass shooting is shocking and tragic, it’s unclear how many people are injured or killed. Of the victims, only one is a character with a name. Partially to blame for the abstracted violence in ROSEWOOD is a larger issue with clarity in a film that has a lot going on, but ROSEWOOD makes it hard to tell exactly how many people live in the town and how many of them are killed. Deaths of major characters like Aunt Sarah are heartbreaking, but most of the bodies we see are those of nameless townspeople who have died offscreen. There is a dehumanizing effect to this volume of anonymous suffering. Ricky’s death in BOYZ is able to communicate the way an act of violence disrupts everything around it more effectively than the bodies of a dozen unnamed extras. Especially considering the wide range of estimates as to the Rosewood massacre’s casualties, this ambiguity on the film’s part isn’t helpful.

This is not to say that there isn’t a lot to admire in the film. Beyond Rhames and Cheadle, who are as great here as they are in everything, there are a number of standout performances. Most notable is Esther Rolle as Aunt Sarah, a voice of reason respected by everyone, white and Black, whose reluctance to speak out against the false rape accusation that motivates the massacre points to the culture of silence and fear that kept the Rosewood story hidden for decades. On a reported budget of $30 million, Singleton and producer Jon Peters certainly do their best to give ROSEWOOD a real sense of scale and prestige, with huge recreations of Rosewood and the nearby white town of Sumner and plenty of grand crane shots to show them off while the John Williams score officially designates it a Big and Important Film. Bruce McGill’s worst-racist-of-all Duke Purdy serves to give the other white characters the opportunity to demonstrate that at least they have a limit when it comes to violent hate crime, and that’s not great, but a subplot between Purdy and his young son illustrates in a concise way both how the ideology of racism is perpetuated on an individual level and how that might be stopped. Fantastical as it may be, the big train chase finale is thrilling and doesn’t skimp on spectacle.

It’s a pity that a high-profile filmmaker’s adaptation of the Rosewood story has itself been more or less forgotten, and that I only learned how much was left out from doing my own reading after the movie was over. But with one exception, this was the last of Singleton’s films to take a serious look at race in America, and it’s worth a watch even if it leaves out the real third act for the people of Rosewood.