THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO **1/2
Joe Talbot
2019
IDEA: A young black man fights to reclaim his grandfather's Victorian house in a heavily gentrified San Francisco neighborhood.
BLURB: The Last Black Man in San Francisco presents an unusual, rather gauche combination of subject matter and tone. It is a film that tackles the very real and destructive urban abuses of gentrification, environmental defilement, and the rippling effects of systemic racism, and yet it’s largely told in a heightened comic register in a universe that often tips into the patently absurd. There are moments when this outsize humor works to invigorate the film’s depiction of the titular city, imbuing it with idiosyncratic life and energy. But there are too many other times when glibness undercuts the issues being explored. This is most egregious in the scenes that attempt to satirize race relations, which hinge on facile, broadly discomfiting interactions between the black characters and the uniformly cartoonish white ones. Talbot and Fails often seem to fall back on millennial-friendly humor and fantastical scenarios as a crutch, as if they’re afraid they might slip into undue earnestness, and the result is strangely watery. Judging by their handling of the drama, however, there should have been no worry. The Last Black Man in San Francisco is at its best when it drops the silliness to focus genuinely on its two core relationships: those between Jimmie and Mont and between Jimmie and San Francisco. The former of these is so moving due to the performances of Fails and Majors, who create a lovely, tender rapport through shared disenfranchisement and off-center personalities. The latter relationship, which is the film’s elegiac ballast, is only more intimate, capturing Jimmie’s intense love for and historical rootedness in the city that has always been his home, and how that love becomes strained, if not defeated, by the city’s inability to keep loving him back. It’s in its final passage that The Last Black Man in San Francisco finds the balance between social anguish and bigheartedness that it often struggles with throughout, ending on a note that resonates because of its painful sincerity.
BLURB: The Last Black Man in San Francisco presents an unusual, rather gauche combination of subject matter and tone. It is a film that tackles the very real and destructive urban abuses of gentrification, environmental defilement, and the rippling effects of systemic racism, and yet it’s largely told in a heightened comic register in a universe that often tips into the patently absurd. There are moments when this outsize humor works to invigorate the film’s depiction of the titular city, imbuing it with idiosyncratic life and energy. But there are too many other times when glibness undercuts the issues being explored. This is most egregious in the scenes that attempt to satirize race relations, which hinge on facile, broadly discomfiting interactions between the black characters and the uniformly cartoonish white ones. Talbot and Fails often seem to fall back on millennial-friendly humor and fantastical scenarios as a crutch, as if they’re afraid they might slip into undue earnestness, and the result is strangely watery. Judging by their handling of the drama, however, there should have been no worry. The Last Black Man in San Francisco is at its best when it drops the silliness to focus genuinely on its two core relationships: those between Jimmie and Mont and between Jimmie and San Francisco. The former of these is so moving due to the performances of Fails and Majors, who create a lovely, tender rapport through shared disenfranchisement and off-center personalities. The latter relationship, which is the film’s elegiac ballast, is only more intimate, capturing Jimmie’s intense love for and historical rootedness in the city that has always been his home, and how that love becomes strained, if not defeated, by the city’s inability to keep loving him back. It’s in its final passage that The Last Black Man in San Francisco finds the balance between social anguish and bigheartedness that it often struggles with throughout, ending on a note that resonates because of its painful sincerity.
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