The character, performed by Jay Will, had his childhood in East Orange, New Jersey and was broadly influenced by science, along with being perhaps almost scarily charming just like Denzel Washington. Rob was raised by a drug dealer father and a mother struggling with three different jobs trying to place him in a Benedictine Monks’ institution. He was a biochemistry major at Yale, and there was a reasonable possibility that he would grow to be an important scientist, but there was a tragedy in his life: his father Skeet was imprisoned for murdering two women with a handgun. The case had all the hallmarks of police showboating (for one thing, the rifle that was brought into the case as the murder weapon was not befitting Skeet’s gun) and all such thoughts plagued Rob constantly: if dad is not guilty then who is, and I need to get him out of here. And indeed, he offered a heroic effort in doing just that, even growing and selling “designer weed” to finance the remarkable costs of many years of legal battles.
“Rob Peace” is a work that pays homage to bottom up Black New Wave cinema that developed in the 1980s and ’90s, usually featuring poor or working class characters experiencing genuine struggle, but on a low budget. There would be no film without the actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, who directed the film and based the screenplay on Jeffrey Hobbs’ nonfiction book, The Other Rob. He also depicts a character called Skeet, who is a big but quite rough man with a lot of love for his son but many weaknesses and shortcomings.
Did Skeet kill two people? He says no, and many in the area believe him, especially since he had never been imprisoned for anything before those murders. Peace’s mother, the well known Mary J. Blige who acts as well as she sings, plays Jackie Peace; she loves her son but is reluctant to say something that would go too far in supporting his father’s case. She simply made some decisions about what information to tell a child who deserved to be loved by his father just like most children are. A father and son separation story is, without doubt, the primary narrative of this motion picture.
Ejiofor has not limited his attention solely on that one component. There is a lot, no really a lot, happening in this adaptation in good and bad terms. It is possible to appreciate the screenplay and the direction in the perspective of a craft rather than just an idea. It is also an example in which there is a lot of trying to do things quickly (getting into a scene and out in the shortest time because of economic and momentum reasons) as well as doing things slowly (making every moment serve a multitude of purposes: introducing or advancing characters, planting bits of foreshadowing, commenting about something other than this one true story).
Besides the many things that it is, “Rob Peace” is also the story of an unforgettable individual, one who employs his talents in order to uplift those who are less fortunate, his father being the greatest example. Just look how he shifts from being humble and thanking his son for help, to looking like he feels it is a given and he should feel ashamed for not dedicating his entire life to his father. But Rob is also a shining example of all that is achievable for the neighbors and teachers, and high school and college mates (he has an unusual talent of bringing many different types of people together for a good time). There’s even a subplot about Rob and some of his friends learning how to capitalize on the burgeoning urban gentrification of the turn of the century and buying and “flipping” the homes in places like East Orange and Newark. Rob’s got the vision, but he also has the skills. It is soon clear the vision came first, and the skills followed.
In essence, the film ‘Rob Peace’ is a one dimensional image of a multifaceted individual that is incomprehensibly ambitious, which aims to capture the essence of what life entails within compressed two hour limits. “Rob Peace” could have gone on for another hour or two, or be adapted into a miniseries. It is as if portions are cut or glossed over. But that is the nature of the undertaking perhaps another tragic accident. (In this day and age, old movie biographies used to have one target, show the most remarkable highlights of a life. They would give you twenty minutes on the childhood of the character, a glimpse into three or four different eras of that character and eventually wrap up with the end credits, and the audience would never complain.)
Another artistic yet harmonious way in which “Rob Peace” deviates from its remembered form is because of its context, said film is intended for the masses. Or something to this effect why is it that movies of this nature do not receive a standard cinema distribution anymore other than those featuring Will Smith, and even then it is a gamble, it appears that people do not go to the cinema nowadays to enjoy themselves in the straight sense of the word! The picture in particular seems to be created with mentions and tags in mind, to get a visceral reaction from the viewers. There is enough room for laughter, tears, gasps, and overheard conversations in the work of Ejiofor and Masahiro Hira Kubo’s film.
Rob stumbles with the realization that he made an error in judgement sometime and the audience would feel it internally if the current scene was being played out in an encompassed theater. He’s gone through difficulties and the current plot condenses the moments where the character widens his perspective.
But the charm of this specific film is how it never coddles viewers saying that if one character’s opinion does not match yours then you have watched it wrongly; how, on the contrary, “Rob Peace” falls into the category of films leaving a sense of incompleteness on multiple levels since “you are going to feel as if you’ve seen a story that doesn’t fit into one box because nobody lives within a box, let alone in a combination of several boxes.”
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