Top Five

With Top Five writer-director Chris Rock establishes himself as a major American film-maker. From his background in standup comedy and film acting he educes a stirring parable about confusions of identity. 

Andre (no relation to Woody, really) Allen is trying to leave his successful comedy career in order to make serious films, like his new film about a black hero of the Haitian revolution. As in Stardust Memories, the star’s fans avidly prefer his early work, “the funny ones,” and don’t want him to get serious. As Andre notes, they’re unaware of the serious import of his comedy. Where Woody Allen’s character sinks ever deeper into the serious, Rock’s Andre finds fulfilment in returning to his comedic roots. His impromptu standup performance proves he can be funny (i) without drugs/booze, and (ii) by drawing serious insights from his own life (e.g., Don’t make any serious decision after getting a blow-job). 

In a pre-title street scene Rosario Dawson and Rock argue over whether any film can be plumbed for meaning. Within the narrative, Dawson’s Chelsea Brown is skeptical about Andre’s connection between the (very) first Planet of the Apes and Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination the next day. But in the pre-title scene, before their characters have been established, Rock argues against film analysis and Dawson for it. Of course, even as himself Rock is playing a role. He is making this film and it’s chockablock with meaning. Down to the closing Rap song: “Nobody knows what it means. But it’s provocative.” 

The central characters all are fragmented identities. Andre’s film success has been based on playing Whammy the Bear, such a complete abdication of character that he appears buried in a bear suit. His self is invisible. When he played himself on the standup stage he felt dependent upon drugs, so there was a kind of health in thus hiding onscreen, until a good woman’s love helps him.

Actually, that’s two women’s love. The woman who pulls him out of dependency is reality TV star Erica Long (Gabrielle Union), whom Andre is about to marry in a network TV spectacular. That's marriage as show. As Erica is aware, she is a void, without any skill or strength, just the empty status of her TV image. She's counting on Andre’s celebrity to sustain her. This marriage is the last thing she has in life, hence the dedication of those blowjobs that persuaded Andre to marry her. In a pathetic parallel, Andre’s ex-wife admits daily torment that she dumped him before he became rich and famous. But she at least went on to a new husband and a hearty family life. Without Andre Erica faces oblivion.

The film covers Andre’s saving from that marriage and his own career misdirection by a NY Times columnist Chelsea Brown. But even she is a figure of fragmented identity. She admits to writing Cosmopolitan “fluff pieces” under a pseudonym. Andre is shattered to discover that all the while she has been spending the day with him as a presumed simpatico she also writes, under a male pseudonym, the column that has targeted him mercilessly over the years. Even that assault has some justice, though, because she has been disappointed by the comedian’s fall from the peak of his performance at her college.

Like Andre, Chelsea is a recovered addict, disappointed by several relationships and experiments, but she gains stability from her little daughter. In family life as in the street rope-skipping scene, Andre prepares but holds back; she jumps in. After they both suppress their discovery of attraction, they are both shattered when Andre discovers her other Times identity. Though she starts out skeptical, she’s won over by his natural exchanges with family and strangers. His open wit at the family scene persuades her he can do comedy straight and justifies her maneuvering him into the club performance. There he rediscovers his natural/best self.

Against those three fragmented characters Silk (J.B. Smoove) stands strong and alone, the only major character without identity issues. He has been Andre’s friend, support, protector, since their schooldays. Now he bails him out two more times, once after Andre’s drunken arrest and ultimately out of his wrongheaded engagement to Erica. We don’t see this happy ending, but it’s strongly suggested when the gift bag Silk gives Andre includes one large shiny shoe. That recalls the Cinderella story Chelsea’s little daughter is considering. Paradoxically, Andre’s fairy-tale ending is solidly rooted in the reality of Chelsea and her daughter. With Silk’s approval and help, Chelsea asserts her best self to realize Andre’s and they are fulfilled together.   

Andre is arrested on the eve of his stag party. Shaken by his exposure of Chelsea Andre drinks a few beers in the supermarket, then destroys the Whammy beer display. It’s an attack on his old humiliating persona. The intensity of his anger at Chelsea proves his ardor for her. As the scene is caught on closed circuit TV, then aired on the network news shows, it threatens to spoil his network wedding — which may have been Andre’s subconscious intention. But the producers rewrite the reality to make that scene part of the drama, not real. That leaves Andre with two choices: the fiction of the wedding to Erica or the fairy-tale ending with Chelsea. This time the fairy-tale is more real. 

     Why is the film titled Top Five? I don’t know but it’s provocative. It refers to the characters listing their top five Rap acts. It seems a black thing though Jerry Seinfeld adds his. When Andre asks the retreating Chelsea for her list she gives it, in tears at losing him. Maybe it proves yet another of her qualifications. Erica isn’t asked. Maybe it’s a variation on the identity theme. We show ourselves by our choices, whether as trivial as our favourite Rap stars or as serious as our choice of careers, mates and selves.
     One more thing. In a sense this films is Post-racial even if America isn't. The pre-title conversation is about whether the first black presidency has changed anything. The woman sees a shift. which the man denies. Andre fails to demonstrate that a black man still can't get a cab in NYC. That's an obsolete prejudice about prejudice  (at least in this movie). When the tar-colored blacks are covered in feathers it's a lusty pillow fight. As that continues, the myth of the superpowered and profuse black stud terrifies   - another black man, not some threatened master race. There are apposite allusions to GW Bush (a well placed portrait) and to the first black president. The white comedians and characters blend in evenly with the black. Andre's debate with his agent with/about The N Word is the main reminder of the old sensitivity. But in the comedy club performances, race is like gender and personal experience -- not an oppressive division but part of the comedian's experience from which to draw his schtick. Some of the best scenes play the warmth and exuberance of the black community. Race is not the issue in this black man's film full of black characters. Personal identity is.