We Grown Now 2023 Movie Review Trailer Poster

If filmmaker Minhal Baig has something, it is his good eye for casting. Her standout second feature, “Hala,” featured the dramatic chops of comedian Geraldine Viswanathan, and even her mostly maligned debut, “1 Night,” featured reliable and rising talents like Anna Camp, Isabelle Fuhrmann and Kyle Allen in juicy roles. Now his third film, the Chicago-set period piece “We Grown Now,” relies on the marvelous work of two first-time actors (Blake Cameron James and Gian Knight Ramirez). Baig certainly knows who he wants to see on the big screen, but that clear vision doesn't always translate to the rest of the production.

Baig's "We Grown Now," which began in the fall of 1992, is set in and around Chicago's Cabrini-Green public housing complex (best known, at least in film circles, for his starring role in the franchise horror film "Candyman") and follows a pair of young best friends, Malik (James) and Eric (Ramirez), as they go through a particularly difficult time in their teenage years. Baig's choice to set his film in such a specific location (which eventually became synonymous with the flaws of public housing) and during such a specific time period (the first "Candyman" was also released in 1992; within three years, the demolition of the complex would begin) is clearly intentional, but the filmmaker cannot take advantage of that recognition to say something deeper about what the lives of the same people she narrates were really like.

Coming of age is always difficult, but he is even more so in Cabrini-Green, a place built on the hope of urban renewal, only to spend his final years falling into decline. When we meet them, school is about to start and Malik and Eric are trying to enjoy the last moments of their summer. That includes the popular children's activity known as "jumping," in which the complex's many children stack mattresses from empty houses and throw themselves onto the pile, hoping to gain some height in the process. They're both good at it and they both love it. But when school starts, very real concerns arise.

That transition is not easy, neither on the screen nor in the context of the film. Soon, the necessary information is delivered through forced exposition, from facts about Malik's family (at one point, his grandmother, played by S. Epatha Merkerson, begins talking about her hometown of Tupelo as if it were new information for Malik) to notes on Eric's loaded home life (what happened to his missing mother, for example).

We learn that Malik's home life is a little more supportive than Eric's: both his mother (Jurnee Smollett, who also produces) and grandmother are present, plus a little sister, and dinner is always on the table. table and well balanced, as Eric usually grabs a slice of pizza while his father (a low-key and underused Lil Rel Howery) relaxes in front of the TV, and that seems to free him up to be a little more active in his personal activities. Eric is more pragmatic, but Malik likes to dream, and both his waking and sleeping lives are often interrupted by fantasies, like imagining the same train that brought his grandparents from Mississippi stopping at his kitchen or having Eric imagines a cracked ceiling like being full of stars, which offer little information about what he's really thinking.

While the moments focused on the children's lives are the best part of the film (James and Ramirez have a natural chemistry and are engaging to watch), Baig occasionally fails on that front as well. Orienting one's place in the world is often nervously handled (repeated moments in which students recite the Pledge of Allegiance are silly, as is a "Ferris Bueller"-style field trip to the Art Institute), with moments of real emotion (one (The nighttime police raid on the complex is truly terrifying and deeply disturbing) and only appears briefly.

Other touches work better. A constant hum of background noise weaves throughout the film (people talking outside, kids screaming, kids playing basketball) to further remind the audience how communal this place is, how everyone's affairs are inevitably tied to each other's. others. Jay Wadley's music adds a touch of fantasy, while Patrick Scola's cinematography finds beauty in all kinds of spaces.

What Baig portrays is not at all revealing: life in Cabrini-Green is beautiful and painful, magical and boring, tense and fun. It's kind of like life anywhere, but instead of that concept feeling universal, it feels impersonal, vague, routine.

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