Whenever Jada Pinkett-Smith Is On Screen, You’re Not Looking At Anything Else

I fell, true and hard, for Jada Pinkett Smith when I saw her kick demonic ass in Ernest Dickerson’s tremendous Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight. An unconventional final girl in an unexpectedly delightful horror film, her character Jerilyn was smart, tough, and beautiful (of course), but more importantly, resourceful enough to survive a night in which a supernatural baddie played by Billy Zane (at the height of his unctuous powers) torments a diner-full of lost travelers one dark and stormy night. She had presence, a Black woman who is an unquestioned hero in a film directed by a Black creator: frequent Spike Lee cinematographer Ernest Dickerson. She filled the screen with her posture and slayed with her gaze.

In the film, she undergoes a transformation from that most pernicious of stereotypes for Black women in film, sweeping up as a member of the service industry, to hardened survivor who figures out the best way to vanquish the white devil is through the violent expulsion of her voice, sheathed in a spray of blood. In the final showdown, clinched in a satanic rumba with Zane’s big-bad, I wasn’t afraid for her; I was sorry for the monster who didn’t have any idea who he was tangling with. If there’s any film that deserves a legacy sequel, it’s this one. Jerilyn, at the end, riding off into the sunset, armed with the literal blood of Christ, boarding a bus to nowhere with legions of the damned slavering at her heels. 

Pinkett is commanding on screen, cast most often as aspirational for the male lead even if her characters (like the snooty, inconstant Lauren in The Inkwell) don’t always deserve the adoration. Aspirational not just as a mate, but as an example of independence from damaging, even deadly, social pressures; the potential to rise above culturally-mandated outcomes that have taken hold (especially in white-dominated creative spaces). She made her first meaningful impression as Lena in the last two seasons of sitcom A Different World, an engineering major who switched to journalism after identifying a need for representation in that field.

From there, she played the female lead — one of the only women in the film, in fact — in the Hughes’ brothers’ debut Menace II Society (1993). In it, she’s Ronnie, single mom and love interest for doomed hero Caine (Tyrin Turner), wanting desperately to move away from the mean streets, with or without the waffling Caine in tow. The film is one in a series of “hoodsploitation” films erupting in the wake of John Singleton’s Boyz ‘n the Hood (1991). It’s arguably the best one. Although its first half is a mannered riff on Scorsese’s Goodfellas, its second half finds emotional truth in the relationships of characters played by actors so green that, initially distracting, their awkwardness begins by the end to feel unaffected and natural. I think this shift in Menace II Society from young people pretending to be Scorsese to fully-fleshed representatives of a devalued group plays brilliantly to the themes of the piece. They’re just kids, not gangsters, after all. Pinkett is tremendous as the person who sees through things to how they really are. Her ferocious defense of her young son represents the only hope in a despairing picture.

Her first featured role is as the title character in Doug McHenry’s sharp, still-powerful Jason’s Lyric (1994). It’s easily the best of her three 1994 films (the others coming-of-age pastiche The Inkwell and private dick flick A Low Down Dirty Shame), a picture about two brothers Jason and Joshua (Allen Payne and Bokeem Woodbine) with a tragic shared history of abuse and privation. Jason falls for Lyric (Pinkett) who, again, wants to move away. She trainspots and bus-watches, fabricating fanciful, romantic destinations for the departures to “anywhere you want.” As part of his courtship of the winsome dreamer Lyric, Jason hires a bus for a day to take them to points of natural and cultural interest; a tour of the possible heights of human endeavor set against the dead ends presented to them from within their cultural prison. Lyric takes a long time to thaw to Jason’s attentions. She wants to be sure Jason has the imagination to be something more than stuck into a proscribed role like his brother who, fresh from prison, immediately falls back into a life of alcohol and crime. Jason’s Lyric is a standout from the hoodsploitation knock-offs because in amongst the carnage and violence to Black bodies (a hallmark of the sub-genre), there is great care taken in fleshing out the generational traumas that have led to the pervasive feeling of social imprisonment and nihilism. Pinkett is incredible and the film is a gem that deserves to be rediscovered.

What persists about Pinkett after three-plus decades in the business is her absolute dedication to working with Black creators on socially-progressive projects. Not all of her work is for me, but all of it feels principled and at least intended to be important. Consider her Demon Knight follow up, F. Gary Gray’s explosive heist film Set It Off, in which four Black women in dire economic straits decide that the only way to get over the hump is to drive a bulldozer through it. Bankteller Frankie (Vivica A. Fox) is fired for having the misfortune of growing up in the same impoverished neighborhood as a bank robber; Stoney (Pinkett Smith) who wants to help her brother pay for college; single mom Tisean (Kimberly Elise) and Cleo (Queen Latifah), the de facto leader of their maid/janitorial crew soon to be joined by a freshly-unemployed Frankie. After Stoney resorts to prostitution in a deeply-uncomfortable scene, the four of them retire to a rooftop to share a joint and talk about their lives. There’s a lot of laughter, a lot of commiseration, a lot of fear about the future and how the only way they can get ahead is by taking. The movie is sharp, interested in the right things, and calling out the income disparity in racial terms in the middle of a period of general prosperity in the United States.

It’s funny how the economic programs offered by either side of the aisle consistently fail to pull up Black communities. Set It Off would pair brilliantly with Joel Schumacher’s white rage flick Falling Down (1993) as two sides of the pot boiling over coin. After a series of indignities visited on the heroes of Set It Off by white executives, institutions, and the nation of cop, the revolution feels not just inevitable but wholly justified. It’s a call to social unrest and disruption, a strong case for the need for redistribution of wealth and resources. An early scene where Stoney expresses her grief and her desire to be anywhere but here arguably resonates now to a broader post-BLM audience than it did in the glad-handing “I feel your pain” Clinton ’90s. 

Stoney is the catalyst for the events of Set It Off. Given a handsome beau in corporate banker Keith (Blair Underwood) that represents for Pinkett a development of her power; she evolves from object of aspiration to being offered an object which she could aspire. When he asks for her number, she declines, “but I will take yours.” Delivered by Pinkett, the line isn’t coy, there’s not the hint of the coquette to her. Delivered by Pinkett, the line is power underpinned by a certain vulnerability. She carries a lot of complexity. She reminds me of Joan Crawford in David Miller’s Sudden Fear, in which a powerful woman is knocked off guard by the attentions of a handsome young paramour. Set It Off deals with complexities, too, taking care to show how Black professionals in the banking industry, on the force, and in Child Protective Services have been assimilated into a system designed to oppress and humiliate the underprivileged. Justice costs money in a rigged system. If you have it, you get some.

The planners of this heist, then, aren’t driven by greed but by a dream of equality. That’s heady stuff and for all the powerful, polished performances in Set It Off, the fantastic action sequences, the exceptional car chase, it’s Pinkett around which the machinations of this piece work. Her vitality is part of what makes her murder during the prologue of the superlative Scream 2 so horrifying. The other part of that sequence’s power is how in a movie auditorium packed with white spectators, her making her way to the stage in front of the screen to ask for help while everyone just thinks she’s part of the show speaks loud to how the destruction of Black bodies is as American a spectator pastime as baseball. One of the great “final girls” in the horror pantheon from Demon Knight, killing Pinkett in the open of Scream 2 identifies how stone cold the film will be going forward. It sets the tone. Pinkett is consistently setting the tone.

Her growth into lead continues with Daisy V. Miller’s Woo in which Pinkett is a sexually-adventurous, proudly extroverted woman looking for a dream man and finding one in Tim (Tommy Davidson), a meek, clumsy, physically unimpressive nebbish who, after getting punched out, has Woo step in with her fists to defend him. For the most part a broad sex comedy, this defanging of the Black male sexual stereotype is extraordinary for the relative scarcity of its depiction. Pinkett is, predictably, entirely credible as an uncontainable force.

I love her in Spike Lee’s scabrous Bamboozled as Sloan Hopkins, one of the creators of a modern minstrel show intended as a The Producers-like takedown of a system already in the process of complicating “The Cosby Show’s” legacy, who is horrified to discover that Black folks engaged in re-enacting pernicious racial stereotypes is precisely the kind of entertainment the majority of the American audience just eats up. Initially gratified by her success, Sloan is ultimately the voice of moral clarity in the picture, the compiler of a montage of racist images in American culture that she uses to try to shame her partner into renouncing their creation. After he initially refuses to screen the footage, Sloan holds him at gunpoint and forces him to consider the foulness of the legacy they’re perpetuating. If you haven’t seen Bamboozled, or haven’t for a while, it’s a good time to revisit it. I didn’t like it when it first came out. I realize now that it’s my own discomfort that caused what was an almost physical rejection of it. It’s frank, incendiary, incredible and Pinkett again is the moral anchor for a giant, seemingly untameable concept.

That’s her sweet-spot, her thing: she’s the fulcrum for change. As resistance pilot Niobe in the three Matrix sequels, she proves the most compelling element: a master-pilot AND a fearsome martial artist. Consider the presence it requires to be the “most” of anything in a series invested in the second and third installments particularly, in a glorious maximalism. She is the voice of reason in the film, rejecting airy “prophecy” in favor of a grounded faith in individual potential. She doesn’t believe in all that messianic mumbo jumbo, but she does believe in the power of one person to affect the fate of a large group of people. I’m always excited when Pinkett shows up in a film.

When she pops up as world-weary Rome in Magic Mike XXL, the master of her domain and the key to the last third of the film, I lost my shit. The film, already a remarkable manifesto about the importance of freedom and self-love, puts a cherry on top of its message of affirmation with just the casting of Pinkett, much less the infectious, inspirational power of her performance. Like Niobe, no she doesn’t believe in grand gestures, but she does believe in nurturing revolutionaries in their acts of “good trouble.” Her villainous nightclub owner Fish Mooney on the Batman spin-off show Gotham is a blend of physical menace and spiritual rot. All of the powerful elements of Pinkett’s screen persona turned to chaotic evil and serving to underscore the attributes that make her memorable, magnetic. 

“When she’s on screen, you’re not looking at anything else. But when she’s off it, you wonder what she’s up to.”

We don’t talk enough about Pinkett as a performer, certainly not enough about her as a cultural force. We’ve skipped over this small window of opportunity to recognize her as singular and influential before going directly to her as tabloid fodder: the scandalously-wayward wife of megastar Will Smith; the mother of budding megastars Jaden and Willow; now the wilting victim of a verbal attack and, equally, a husband’s violent defense of her. It’s those roles — the Hester Prynne, the doting mother, the victim to be avenged — that are more familiar, and thus infinitely more comfortable, for the toxic monoculture against which Pinkett’s been pushing for her entire, edged career. Her oeuvre boasts of an embarrassment of high points, pictures in which she largely hasn’t been given enough credit as a major, if not the major, reason for their success. Get started with Demon Knight, move through Jason’s Lyric and Set It Off, and cap it off with Girls Trip. When she’s on screen, you’re not looking at anything else. But when she’s off it, you wonder what she’s up to. Pinkett’s work speaks for itself. She’s a star.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for pre-order. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.