TV Note: "Top Five" (9/4)
David Shasha
"Top Five" will be screened on Showtime 2 Saturday, September 4th at 9:00 PM
Deconstructing Harry: Chris Rock Dismantles Woody Allen and Finds Artistic Integrity in “Top Five” (2015)
Before I begin this essay, I must start with a startling confession: As the credits rolled on what is one of the most astounding – and unrecognized – films of this era, I saw two names on the Executive Producer credits that sort of shocked me:
Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter and Kanye West
I must say that I was utterly shocked because those two names represent everything false and pretentious in our culture that the Chris Rock movie “Top Five” so mercilessly attacks.
But, to use the fractured flashback insertion modality that Rock deploys in this extraordinary artistic statement, it is necessary to return to two Woody Allen movies that speak to that man’s immense ego and narcissism.
The first is Allen’s famous move to “serious” reflective personal cinema in “Stardust Memories” (1982):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardust_Memories
That was when Allen, coincidentally the surname of Rock’s character in “Top Five,” decided that being “funny” was not artistically satisfying to him.
The second is “Deconstructing Harry” (1997), Allen’s poisoned “response” to Philip Roth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstructing_Harry
“Deconstructing Harry” is about a writer whose life seems to be based on Roth, but its satire ultimately falls flat as Allen shows us just how obsessed and deeply angry he is with the great novelist and his many artistic successes:
http://articles.latimes.com/1997/dec/22/entertainment/ca-1137
In both movies Allen wants to be taken “seriously” as a literary artist with “big” things to say; things that transcend the sort of slapstick comedy that had been in stock-in-trade in the first stages of his career.
In 1977 Allen released “Annie Hall” which was effectively a transitional movie that had the usual slapstick shtick elements, but with a more reflective personal tone.
In the movies that led up to “Stardust Memories” Allen played with form and content, but it was the 1982 movie that formally heralded a filmmaker who wanted to be Bergman and Fellini instead of Chaplin and Keaton.
This process allows us to better understand what Chris Rock is aiming at in “Top Five,” and how his artistic choices, rooted in Woody Allen-style reflectiveness, ultimately serve to undermine – better Deconstruct – those “serious” paradigms, and ultimately move Rock away from Allen’s fatalism and nihilistic Sang Froid.
“Top Five” uses time shifts – flashbacks and narrative insertions – to tell the story of former Stand-Up comedian Andre Allen; a celebrity who has abandoned his raucous, alcohol- and drug-fueled artistry, to become a conventional movie star.
Andre Allen has become famous playing a character called Hammy the Bear, a kind-of idiot jokey action hero who has become a household name in the African-American community and a crossover star in the TMZ Hollywood Idiocracy.
But like his Ashkenazi nebbish namesake, Andre Allen is restless and unhappy.
He has just finished making “Uprize!”, a semi-fictionalized Idiocracy account of the famous Haiti Slave revolt.
Allen wants “Uprize!” to raise him out of the Hammy Bear detritus and into “serious” artistic territory.
Complicating things is his impending Reality TV marriage to Erica Long, bitingly played by the great Gabrielle Union.
Long is a self-professed talentless product of the New Idiocracy that also gave us Donald Trump. She is working with the Bravo network to hook up the wedding into a massive TV event, even going to the lengths of changing the wedding rings in order to conform to network executive desires.
As the wedding plans develop, and as “Uprize!” is being readied for commercial release with the attendant publicity campaign, Allen is approached by a reporter with her own personal complications and emotional bifurcations.
Chelsea Brown, aka James Nielson, a pompous NYT movie critic who has savaged Allen’s movies in the past, initially presents herself as a dispassionate, “cool” elite who confronts the star’s vain pretenses in order to get at his real “truth.”
Brown is played by the brilliant Rosario Dawson in a way that effectively unpeels the layers of a very complex character.
As Allen is confronting his own demons, and the relentless process of making sense of his sham Reality TV wedding and the many ways that he has torpedoed his artistic values in order to maintain his celebrity status, we see how Brown’s tough façade is slowly disentangled to reveal a deeply vulnerable woman who has moved from one bad relationship to another, and has created various sham alter-egos in her job as a writer and reporter.
The two characters reflect each other’s vulnerabilities and strengths. They have a compulsion for both truth-telling and painfully raw prevarications. They are recovering alcoholics whose pain comes from a lack of authenticity and a difficulty in finding supportive lovers who would accept them for who they really are.
Here it is necessary to return to the Woody Allen frame and assert that Rock’s brilliantly funny and deeply philosophical script undermines celebrity pretense and artistic quackery by examining the relationship between the Real and the Imaginary.
In “Stardust Memories” Allen goes to great pains to expose the entertainment industry as a straitjacket that is strangling his “true” artistic ambitions. He is on the run from the acolytes and the in-crowd, even as he hypocritically plays to those very elitist cultural elements.
But in “Top Five” Rock makes strategic use of his family and friends’ network in the old neighborhood to bring him back down to earth.
Here we see uproarious cameo turns by Leslie Jones, Tracy Morgan, Jay Pharaoh, Michael Che, and Sherri Shepherd as the Allen character is forced to confront the insufferable celebrity fake he has become, in front of people who do not care at all about his TMZ life.
The “Top Five” of the title is a game that the protagonists play as they are asked to choose and defend their favorite Hip-Hop artists.
Allen is brought face-to-face with his past and how that personal history has played into his comedy and how that comedy has become warped and twisted through the prism of the Hollywood Idiocracy and Reality TV world that now owns him body and soul.
In a climactic scene in the movie he is shocked to learn who Chelsea Brown really is, leading him to start drinking again under all the pressure of his new “reality,” as he discovers how the fake “reality” of the recent past has imprisoned him and completely broken his spirit.
Again, it is one of his oldest friends and business confidants, Silk, someone who has been there for Allen since they were kids, who is able to counsel the nervous artist and steer him out of harm’s way.
Silk is played in an outstanding turn by J.B. Smoove, someone who has never impressed me as being more than an idiotic Black caricature. But here he anchors the Allen character and serves as his consiglieri, dispensing love and wisdom in equal measure.
After Allen’s violent, drunken outburst in a bodega, a fake story is concocted by the network, explaining that his arrest and jailing are all part of the Reality TV show plot!
It is at this point that Brown, clearly in love with Allen, takes him down to the Comedy Cellar on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village, one of the first places Allen played as a Stand-Up.
When Allen performs a brief set at the club he becomes a changed man.
Brown has forced him to confront the sources of his greatness and accept that he has thrown that all away for the gaudy presentiments of the TMZ Idiocracy that he now lives in.
At a critical moment we get a flashback insertion from the jail sequence that features the much-incarcerated Rapper DMX.
The exchange between Allen and DMX explains how the former decided to recalibrate his attitude and re-embrace the Stand-Up Comedy that he wanted to eschew.
Indeed, we now have Rock completely inverting the Woody Allen “Stardust Memories” model, as he chooses to be “funny” as a way to be “serious”!
In a certain sense, Rock returns to the thematic of Preston Sturges’ 1941 Depression-era classic “Sullivan’s Travels,” even though he makes no explicit reference to that movie.
Rather than continue with the false pretenses of his current life, Allen now chooses the integrity and authenticity of his inner creativity; refusing to lie and pretend that he is something that he is not.
Crucially, Rock deploys the Cinderella story through the Dawson character, and constructs a deeply thoughtful romantic scenario that will ultimately serve to cut through the pain and detritus of the two characters’ unhappiness and their play-acting to suit the whims of others.
As we saw in “Deconstructing Harry,” Woody Allen harbored a tremendous resentment and jealously towards Philip Roth, the very epitome of a literary titan that Allen always wanted to be, but could never be.
In Deconstructing Woody Allen’s massive pretenses, Rock has unlocked the key to his own creativity and genius.
After spending many fruitless years making a lot of Hollywood dreck and being unable to integrate his comedic genius into a cinema of more intellectual heft, Rock has with “Top Five” fully succeeded in producing a work of narrative art that speaks to both the personal human being and the public entertainer.
There are moments in “Top Five” that not only stand with the most hilarious in the formidable Chris Rock comedy canon, but which stand with the greatest comedic moments in the history of American cinema.
“Top Five” successfully transforms and buries the flotsam and jetsam of our current Idiocracy and its manifestations in the repugnant TMZ tabloid universe, so amply represented in the Trump Show and its horrifying spectacle.
Rock has brilliantly taken on the many horrors and demons regurgitated by this dyspeptic culture with its residual malevolence and ignorance.
But then we go right back to those two Executive Producers: Jay-Z and Kanye and their high standing in the commercial marketplace.
When it was released in 2015 “Top Five” received wide critical acclaim, but it is not clear if anyone actually saw it or cared about it.
Redoubling the frustration of Andre Allen’s “Uprize!” in a startlingly reflexive manner, Rock’s cinematic masterpiece emerged into the public consciousness with a resounding thud.
Indeed, I would compare the movie’s reception to that of Janelle Monae’s musical masterpieces, recorded for Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs’ label, that brought her groundbreaking Archandroid character to life:
We have seen how Monae’s commercial failures led her into acting and modeling. Her current “return” to music has shown her embracing the very debilitating commercial machinations that she once decried in her songs and in her performances.
Since the release of “Top Five” Rock has not seen an artistic resurgence in his career.
Sadly, as we watch the movie today we see how a tree can fall in the forest but not be heard if there is no one there.
Rather than resetting his career on a firmer artistic foundation, Rock’s masterpiece is an outlier that shows the truth of the old Bobby Fuller song made famous by The Clash, “I Fought the Law and the Law Won”!
We continue to see the toxic degeneration of Hip-Hop into crude materialism and violent barbarity rather than intellectual reflection and social consciousness.
Reality TV is more dominant than ever.
It has even taken over our White House.
Rock’s latest movie is another idiotic buddy-bro Adam Sandler “comedy” of the sort beloved by Hollywood producers who do not want an African-American Preston Sturges:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Week_Of
It comes on the heels of the equally inane “Grown Ups” franchise:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grown_Ups_(film)
In what can only be seen as a radical move, Rock will be appearing in the new season of the “Fargo” TV series:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/arts/television/chris-rock-fargo-season-4.html
“Top Five” was unfortunately not the commercial adrenaline shot that would have brought Rock’s Art closer to his market share.
It is therefore ironic that as Rock so brilliantly Deconstructed Woody Allen, he has not been taken seriously by a movie industry that continues to produce dreck and an endless series of mindless Action Movies.
The “Top Five” domestic gross was a shade over $26 million, a paltry sum by any assessment:
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=topfive.htm
Let us look at the domestic gross of “Black Panther,” one of those mindless Cartoon Action Movies:
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=marvel2017b.htm
When the domestic gross is combined with the international, the total is over $1 billion!
And let us look at “Get Out” – the Black Separatist fantasy for the Ta-Nehisi Coates Millennial generation:
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=blumhouse2.htm
Over $175 million before the international receipts.
But I think that the most important thing to keep in mind is that both “Black Panther” and “Get Out” have had a transformative cultural impact.
It is not only that they made a lot of money, but that they have become emblematic of where we are now as a country and civilization.
And yet “Top Five” is not only a vastly superior artistic product, it connects to the Golden Age of Hollywood comedy in a way that the enfeebled Woody Allen has not been able to do for many decades, since the time he went “serious.”
More than this, the movie is one of the most brutally honest depictions of African-American life today as it deploys its multiple vernaculars and burrows deep inside the internal contradictions and complications of a community that is besieged by financial contradictions and violent confrontation by the authorities.
Rock shows this Police Brutality as Andre Allen is violently roughed up on his way out of the bodega.
This frankness is a welcome – and necessary – response to the detritus of Reality TV and the new Hip-Hop plantation and its degenerate ways.
Chris Rock has been one of the great African-American artists of our time, and his struggles with the industry are exposed for an airing in “Top Five.”
It reminds us of Robert Townsend’s equally visionary masterpiece “Hollywood Shuffle” (1987), which also skewered a system that stigmatized Black people, forcing them to “Shuck and Jive” as Pimps and Drug Dealers rather than allow them to compete with Caucasian actors for “serious” roles.
The crisis engendered by the madness of the current Hip-Hop world can clearly be seen in arrogance and ignorance of Kanye West and his bizarre embrace of Trumpworld Alt-Right racism:
Under the malign influence of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jordan Peele is now a major Hollywood player, his “Get Out” White Cannibalism has become a comforting bromide to White Hollywood executives:
More than any of this is the runaway success of “Black Panther” which once again returns Black Americans to the imaginary Afrocentric ghetto of Wakanda where they will have their own pretend “revolution”:
The effective silencing of Chris Rock from the Adult Table in Hollywood is a sad reflection of where our culture is today.
But for those who seek a strong dose of intelligent discourse that speaks in a brutally honest way to the thorny dilemmas of African-Americans, “Top Five” successfully connects us to the many subversive comedies of the Golden Age of Hollywood: From “Sullivan’s Travels” to “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” to “His Girl Friday” to “My Man Godfrey” we have seen great writers and directors take on the “serious” themes and turn them into hilarious Screwball Comedies that entertain as they enlighten.
So, whatever the ultimate commercial fate of “Top Five,” it will remain, like Mike Judge’s classic “Idiocracy,” an important cultural milestone for those who continue to refuse the pablum that Hollywood continues to churn out to an audience of mindless sheep.
David Shasha
From SHU 863, October 10, 2018