Every year at Sundance, the studios (or their indie sister companies) impatiently wait for the breakout hits: the films that cause widespread laughing, crying, screaming, tweeting or preferably all of the above. The titles that cause the most fervent reactions are then snapped up, repackaged and sold to a mainstream audience with enthused quotes like “You’re going to LOVE this movie”. The process, which has unearthed some gems in the past, has grown tired and shamelessly transparent.
The films that are miraculously “saved” from what’s seen as an ignoble fate in – clutches pearls – arthouse cinemas no longer feel quite as fresh, their very existence seemingly tailored to slither into this cynical machine. Audiences are becoming wise to this too. Recent big-money acquisitions, such as Dope and Me, Earl and the Dying Girl, have felt a little too slickly engineered and both were inevitable box office disappointments.
This year, Fox Searchlight paid $9.5m for Patti Cake$, a film that other companies were reportedly clamoring over, and it’s easy to see why. Or it’s easy to see why if the year was 2007, not 2017.
The titular character, also known as Killer P, Dumbo and Patricia (newcomer Danielle MacDonald) is a 23-year-old with big dreams. She focuses on her ambition of becoming a successful rapper while trying to avoid the monotonous details of her real life: working at a scuzzy local bar and living at home with her sick grandmother (Cathy Moriarty) and difficult mother (Bridget Everett). But together with her friend Hareesh (Siddharth Dhananjay), she hatches a plan to escape New Jersey and become a star.
Writer/director Geremy Jasper (best known for his music video work) has crafted a story that’s loosely based on his own experiences growing up in New Jersey. The minutiae of Patricia’s life certainly feels real but in trying to morph the script into Sundance fare, Jasper hits upon a niggling discrepancy between reality and twee indie tropes. So while there’s something horribly believable about the family’s inability to pay grandmother’s medical bills, he loses us the moment she starts becoming part of Patricia’s rap outfit (no, really). Placing crowd-pleasing quirk over authenticity is a frustrating misstep throughout and makes the film feel like less of a miraculous discovery and more of a carefully positioned money-maker.
MacDonald, whose performance was heavily buzzed during the festival, has undeniable presence but she never really convinces as someone who’s spent years crafting rhymes, dreaming of a career in rap. A film this heavily reliant on the transformative power of music is disappointingly lacking in any legitimately great songs. By choosing a fictional rapper as the focal point of Patricia’s obsession (a caricature that feels more like a dated SNL impression), we’re also deprived of any real world hip-hop. As soon as the credits roll, you’ll be desperately heading to Spotify, scrambling to wash out your ears with some actual rap tracks.
While there are numerous references to her being a white girl trying to make it in an industry tailored towards black stars, Jasper makes a clumsy attempt to include a central black character to offset any whitewashing accusations. In the band that’s created (aside from Patricia, Hareesh and, *forced audience chuckle* her grandma), there’s also a spot for Bob, AKA Basterd the Antichrist, an African American Marilyn Manson type. He remains largely mute throughout and while it’s refreshing to see a black musician whose speciality isn’t hip-hop, it’s tiresome that when he finally does open his mouth, it’s only to spout mythical statements designed to help our heroine achieve her goal. In other words, he’s yet another example of the magical negro trope, the stock black character who helps out white folk with unexplained mysticism.
As with the other supporting characters, he’s more of a script description than a real person. Everett, a raucous comic championed by Amy Schumer, tries (and sings) admirably but is also stuck with a stock cipher: the mother whose dream of stardom failed so instead, she takes it out on her kid. It’s as overused as the film’s finale which, you guessed it, takes place at a local rap competition.
Patti Cake$ is by no means a hopelessly bad movie, it’s just hampered by its desperate need to be a crowd-pleaser. Jasper is a student of the Sundance Institute, a festival-run organization that aims to progress the work of untested storytellers, and it shows painfully throughout. There’s some grit and realism buried underneath the formula but the edges have been smoothed out and instead, we’re stuck in a world that’s only recognizable to anyone who watches a lot of indie movies. Don’t believe the hype.
- Patti Cake$ was screening at the New Directors/New Films festival in New York and will be released in the US on 18 August and in the UK on 1 September
