Fresh

Justifiably hailed as one of the most powerful and innovative films of 1994, screenwriter Boaz Yakin's directorial debut offers a wrenching portrait of a 12-year-old African American boy struggling to survive in a Brooklyn ghetto. The story unspools slowly with a sprawling, nearly silent panorama of the boy's daily life. Fresh (Sean Nelson in his feature film debut) is first seen walking to school, and but for stopping to pick up a delivery from a local drug dealer, he seems like any other boy. While Fresh may appear young and inexperienced, one look into his intelligent, sensitive but street-hardened eyes shows that he is old beyond his years. Shrewd, hard-working and loyal, Fresh is a taciturn youth, and this earns him the respect of the rival drug dealers for whom he works. Both kingpins have become his mentors, and he seems destined to become just like them. Sometimes, Fresh goes to Washington Square to play chess for money. He is a remarkable player, but is no match for his beer-swilling, unemployable father (Samuel L. Jackson), a world class chess player who never had the chance to compete. A ruthless player, his father gives Fresh invaluable advice about the game's nature and ultimately about life itself. Those words come in handy when a schoolyard crisis prompts Fresh to began planning his cold-blooded, methodical escape from ghetto life. During the film, one waits for the stereotypes, the cartoonish two-dimensional characters, inevitable moralizing against an unjust, oppressive society, and the glorified, graphically violent action sequences punctuated by the pounding beat of angry rap music, but Fresh studiously avoids such cliches. The characters are three-dimensional and presented with little judgment; the drug lords are bad men, but they are also very human. His sister is on a ruinous road, but she is not a purely tragic victim. When violence occurs it is ingloriously swift and ugly. Percussionist Stuart Copeland's soundtrack subtly underscores the action.