Idlewild

Review By: Aaron Cutler
AaronCutler@TheCinemaSource.com

Idlewild takes place firmly in the realm of Movieland. Its story is set in the poor black Georgia of the 1930s, but its vision of the era includes talking flasks, singing cuckoo clocks and people dancing to Outkast songs. Director Bryan Barber shows as much fidelity to the period as Baz Luhrmann did in representing life as it was actually lived at the Moulin Rouge. This is not the film’s problem so much as its point, and those who take fault with Barber’s vision should file a class action suit against the laws of escapism.

The film opens with a zoom-in on an old-fashioned record player, which in turn leads to black-and-white photographs and a Shakespearian voiceover. The thrust is clear: We are entering the fantastical world of the record player and, at film’s conclusion, we appropriately zoom back out.

For those who do not know already, Idlewild marks the feature film debut of the hip-hop duo Outkast, whose members - André Benjamin and Antwan A. Patton (better known as André 3000 and Big Boi) - play the leads here. Patton plays Rooster, the drinking, womanizing, fast-living owner of a speakeasy called the Church in the imaginary town of Idlewild; Benjamin plays the magnificently-monikered Percival Jenkins, a shy piano player at the club who works at a funeral parlor in the daytime and dreams of leaving town for Chicago.

Benjamin and Patton have both acted before; Patton made his film debut earlier this year in ATL, while Benjamin has appeared in Four Brothers and Be Cool. As singers-turned-actors, they rank high above Madonna and several notches below Cher. While they are decent actors, their real strength is as performers. Their periodic production numbers (most of which are taken from the duo’s separate-but-equal 2003 triumph, Speakerboxx/The Love Below) shoot blasts of energy that catapult the film into excitement. The two men never duet, but keep their songs separate and stay within their Outkast personas – Benjamin’s numbers are often melancholy, sung by himself as he greets a new day, while Patton’s are more bouncingly boisterous and incite people to “get down.”

Also befitting the group’s schizophrenic identity, the two leads only appear together in one or two scenes. Their story lines occupy different spaces, as Percival falls in love with uncertain blues singer Angel (Paula Patton, no relation to Antwan) while Rooster falls deep in debt to nasty gangster Trumpy (Terrence Howard). In interviews Benjamin has said that he liked the ‘30s as a period because of the look, which makes sense when we see that Idlewild is divorced from any notion of reality. The movie, for example, makes no mention of racism, segregation or any of the mitigating social factors that might have caused a poor black town to come about; for that matter, life in Idlewild doesn’t even seem that bad, robbing Percival’s desire to escape of its dramatic weight.

With that being said, the film still looks ...