March 25-31, 2004

movies

A Complicated Man

Death becomes him: DMX lives on.

Never Die Alone fulfills the needs of the 'hood genre, even as it questions them.

by Cindy Fuchs

King David (DMX) lies in a coffin, surrounded by white satin, his Armani suit perfectly creased, his arms crossed over his chest. "We reap what we sow," his voiceover intones while the camera pulls out and circles him. "That's what the Bible says." Beat. "Payback's a motherfucker. I think James Brown said that."

King's death opens Never Die Alone, but his throbbing self-consciousness drives it. James Gibson's screenplay, based on Donald Goines' infamous pulp novel, has King inflict every sort of evil a man might imagine. King is a pimp, a dealer, a gangster and a bully, hateful toward women, coldly vicious toward men. As he tells his story, he has returned to New York from Los Angeles, 10 years later, to right the many wrongs he inflicted on most everyone he knew. It's telling that the only people he feels compelled to reimburse are men, but most every man in his weirdly retro-noiry world espouses such casual misogyny.

Ornery as he may be, King's real problem is that his decision to settle his earthly debts comes too late; his former associates, at least as treacherous and untrusting as he is, aren't about to forgive. These include the mightily colorful kingpin of everything (heroin, women and, apparently, singers), Moon (Clifton Powell), and his young henchman, Mike (Michael Ealy, popular pretty boy of the Barbershop movies). The latter carries a special grudge against King, having to do with a big old scar on his cheek -- which he touches ominously, head lowered, whenever King's name comes up.

It's not hard to guess what this grudge is about, but what the film lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in grim, aggressive style. Directed by Ernest Dickerson (Spike Lee's former cinematographer and director of Juice and Our America) and shot by Matthew Libatique, the film achieves a peculiar blend of harshness and darkness. Shadows seep through every crimson interior; even the film's flashbacks to sunny California are oversaturated with gloomy expectation.

These flashbacks are generated by videotapes King leaves behind, part of his legacy bequeathed to the last man to see him alive, Paul (David Arquette), a wannabe journalist who's been soaking up thuggish local "color," looking for the story that might put him over. The story King tells apparently fulfills all of Paul's fantasies of thug life, from the movie-inspired catchphrasing ("Enter the motherfuckin' dragon," breathes King, as he stands on a threshold) to Moon's desirous mantra: "What else is there? Money, pussy and money." Paul's more than ready to consume this tale, living in an uptown apartment decorated with Wu-Tang and Miles posters and dating an upscale black girl (Aisha Tyler). She finally dumps him when he misses their anniversary dinner to take King to the hospital. Tired of what she calls his "whole slumming thing," she cuts deeper still, accusing him of using her as "part of your research." Paul doesn't even bother to talk her out of leaving. (Apparently, he can't help himself: "I need to find out how this man died," he whines.) Frankly, girlfriend's assessment sounds about right.

Paul's mini-meltdown rather pales in comparison with the film's other major narratives, namely, King's excursion to L.A. and Mike's vengeance against Moon (whose contract on Mike results in the inadvertent murder of Mike's schoolgirl sister, another plot point that comes as a ferocious non-surprise). The beachy scenes have King picking up a pretty blond actor, Janet (Jennifer Sky), whose co-workers on a Baywatch-y TV series provide King with a ready set of users. Their addictions make him a fortune selling junk and reinforce his general sense that everyone is weak, pathetic and beneath contempt, including Janet, whose heroin habit is the result of his switching up her coke. As he tells it, for the eager Paul, no woman (though he has other names for her) can resist him.

King's next and most visibly pathetic victim is Juanita (Reagan Gomez-Preston). When King first spots her, he narrates, she's serving drinks and going to college, or, as he puts it, "Everything a man could want, beautiful, intelligent, uncorrupted." Predictably, he has to turn this situation around (that is, ""She'd be mine"). His seduction involves corruption of all sorts, from revealing her freaky sex practices to exchanging her coke stash (which he's provided) for heroin. By the time she's turned into a runny-nosed, angry, shattered junkie, he's way past caring.

It's at this point that he decides he's been mean and destructive for long enough, such that he heads back east and the film picks up where it began, with Paul's creepy captivation. For this is the end of King's story, its most devastating revelation, that King's seeming brilliance is a product of his dedicated audience.

Never Die Alone

Directed by Ernest Dickerson A Fox Searchlight release Opens Friday at area theaters

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