It's exciting to see Ice Cube on screen again in Barbershop. It is not just seeing Cube on the screen, but the release of another Cube film that thrills me. Five months ago, I met the man himself in Chicago, where he gave me his take on everything from portrayals of inner-city ghettos in film to the straight-up playah mentality necessary to succeed in the entertainment industry today. What drew me to Cube was his calm, yet determined demeanor. And it is this very trait which has undoubtedly contributed to his steady rise from his days in N.W.A. to a career as the film director/producer seen today. He has become a dynamic force in the film industry with his work in both comedy and action films. But Cube remains a complex character, always playing the straight man in his films, yet maintaining a much more marketable, comfortable persona for the American mainstream than his playah counterparts Dr. Dre and Snoop. He has proven that in both film and in life, he has the ability to make us feel at home, even as he shakes us out of our element.
That sense of comfort is what I felt when the titular barbershop came on screen. The local hang-out of the characters in the film, the barbershop is populated with a number of faces we've seen before: among them, hip-hop's Eve (making her film debut) and comedian Cedric the Entertainer (The Original Kings of Comedy). The familiar faces match up with equally familiar character types: there's the street-wise gangsta, Ricky, the grandfatherly, preacher-like Eddie, the sassy femme-fatale barber, Terri Jones, and even the out-of-place white barber, Troy, who's out to prove he can cut it (pun intended) with the rest of the crew.
In what seems to be the single complex character of the bunch, Cube plays shop owner Calvin, a man torn between his loyalty to the barbershop and his record-producing ambitions. Faced with a struggling business in Chicago's South Side, Cube thoughtlessly sells the barbershop to sleazy, ghetto-fabulous businessman, Lester (Keith David). At the outset of the film, neither Calvin nor the audience are aware of just how much he's lost. It's only through Calvin's surrounding cast, so to speak, that we come to understand the barbershop's importance not only to Calvin, but to the community as a whole.
We are introduced to these characters in a meta-discursive fashion -- as each one rifs on the conventional image he or she portrays. Barbershop, however, really starts to get interesting when these apparent stereotypes start to delve into serious issues. For example, Eddie (Cedric the Entertainer) -- who often lectures his fellow workers in the shop -- preaches that Black people ought to admit a few simple things: namely that "O.J. was guilty" and "All Rosa Parks did was just sit her tired ass down." The lines make one a bit uncomfortable, and it's especially strange to hear them in a film that advertises itself as a goofball PG-13 comedy.
But we shouldn't underestimate Cube's -- or director Tim Story's -- ambitions. In a film that tackles everything from urban crime to slave reparations, the line between comedy and drama is often a blurry one. At times heavy-handed in its dramatic tone, Barbershop is a comedy that presses us to take its characters seriously. While it's not always easy to listen to oversimplified characters saying something that we don't expect or don't want to hear, this is exactly what Cube asks us to consider: whether these deliberately constructed figures of urban America are capable of representing the real people they are based upon.
The film works best when it plays upon the very notion of a conventional urban American society. By the end of the film, Barbershop's characters no longer fit their respective stereotypes. Ricky, the gangsta street-thug, turns out to be an articulate speaker on the implications of slave reparations. And Troy, the white barber, proves he can cut a 'fro like a pro. The Barbershop itself becomes more than just another goofball comedy; and in that respect, the film is like the man behind it. Ice Cube. The producer. The playah. The philosophizer. He is more than just a man with a mission, he's a playah who knows where he's come from. Because there's jokesters and then there's playahs. And you don't confuse a playah with a jokester.
