Rob Peace Movie Review — Sundance 2024 — Sucharita Tyagi
If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen a couple of weeks ago, a man named Jeff Hobbs quote tweeted me, which I shared. I tweeted right after watching this one movie and said ki he kind of film which makes trekking through the snow in Utah worth it.
The man in the quote tweet was Jeff Hobbs, the author of the book the movie is based on, the movie is Rob Peace. WHY I didn’t mind trekking through the snow at 9 AM for it, aao lets talk.
Based on the book, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, the biography has been adapted and directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor. The film tells the story of Rob, a black American man from New Jersey, we first meet him as a kid in 1987. Mary J Blige and Chiwetel play his separated parents. Mother Jackie works multiple jobs to make ends meet, while his father Skeete doesn’t seem to have a steady job, and is involved in the drug trade. All that is expected of young Rob is to focus on his studies, use that brilliant brain everyone knows he has, and make it big, break out of the cycle of suppression.
Except in modern America, systemic racism which pulls Rob back each time he tries to break away from his shackles. As a character says later, “Chaos was always waiting”.
We get a look at Rob’s life through his roommate at Yale, a university he made it to by sheer hard luck and kind benefactors. The room is the author of the book Jeff Hobbs, who conducted interviews with friends and family, to put his book together. As such his gaze toward Rob seems to be that of a white American coming to terms with his complicity in the racism that continuously stopped his roommate from living up to his full potential. Chiwetel’s direction elevates this detailed text.
Jay Will’s portrayal of Rob is so sublime seeing him at the QnA after felt bizarre. One of his earliest memories as a child is of his house being on literal fire, a metaphorical foreshadowing of the fires he will have to douse through his life. Its safe to attribute Jay Will incredibly moving and realized portrayal of Rob as the biggest reason the movie manages to stay afloat despite some simplistic plot developments. The insight the film wants to give you into the anguished mind of the young man is all possible due to the heavy lifting Jay Will does.
Chiwetel writes himself some great scenes as well. A man so at his wits ends after every institution lets him down, he can’t help but focus his ire, anger, and the weight of all his expectations on the one person who still cares, his son, without stopping to understand what this might to do the man just starting his adult life. As Skeet, the father, slowly inches closer to unreversible despondence, he becomes more and more narcissistic, and selfish. He stops being a father, is simply a man in a cage, for whom everything outside is to be blamed equally for his captivity. As he loses hope, he loses reason, inadvertently leading his son down a dangerous path.
I wish I had more to say for Camilla Cabello, but despite being this huge star people showed up to cheer for at the screening, she has precious little to do in the film, appearing as the token girlfriend who tries to warn Rob from going too wayward, only for him to not listen. She is witness to one side of Rob, the man at Yale who despite the racism at the elite institution, keeps his head high. The other woman in his life Mary J Blige as the mother sees the only other side, the life she wants him to leave behind. Both see Rob’s potential as a member of society, but a society he perhaps didn’t even want to be a part of. After Yale, he comes back to sell real estate at home, he goes to teach the same school he was at, and has to be goaded out of both these places, again to achieve this “protentional”.
Chiwetel’s screenplay moves at a pace just fast enough to keep his viewers on the edge of their seats, while still being unhurried, paying adequate respect to his characters, those who don’t have their stories heard. For those who knew Rob Peace, his story might just be that of another young man caught with the wrong people, but through the eyes of his roommate and now this film, you see the man who was brilliant at everything he did, but held to different and unfair standards, couldn’t come out on top, hard as he tried.
