Hollywood Loves a Comeback—Until a Black Woman Needs One

Picture winning an Emmy and still having to walk into a room where people act like you need to prove you belong there. That's the situation at the center of Misty Green, Chris Rock's new A24 film. Rosalind Eleazar plays a former star trying to revive a career that has gone sideways. I haven't watched the finished movie yet, so I'm not handing out a review or pretending I know how every scene plays. But the setup alone got my attention. Hollywood loves telling us about second chances. I wonder how often it actually gives them to people who aren't already everybody's favorite.

Rock wrote and directed this one, his first feature as director since Top Five in 2014. His name is naturally going to dominate the headlines, but what I like about the decision is who he's putting at the center of the story. Eleazar isn't playing somebody whose only job is to make a famous man's character more interesting. She's the lead. The film also has Adam Driver, Daniel Kaluuya and Anna Kendrick, but early coverage is talking about Eleazar's performance as the thing to watch. That's worth noticing in an industry where a Black actress can be incredibly talented and still have to keep convincing people she's worth a complicated role.

And I mean complicated. From the film's description and the reviews, Misty is talented, but she's also made mistakes and has relationships to repair. Good. I don't want every story about a Black woman to require her to be perfect before an audience will care about her. We let men be selfish, difficult, reckless and still interesting on screen all the time. Why should a woman have to be somebody's role model just to get a full character arc? Rock wrote in his own note for A24 that Misty's problem isn't a lack of ability; it's a system that keeps asking her to demonstrate her value. That idea goes further than this one fictional actress.

Whether the movie pulls it off is something I'll judge when I see it. Critics aren't all agreeing, and they don't have to. What I'm rooting for is the effort behind it: a well-known Black filmmaker trying something more dramatic, with a Black woman carrying the story instead of standing somewhere on the edge of it. If we want different stories out of Hollywood, somebody has to make room for them before the audience can even decide what it thinks.

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