"Get Rich or Die Tryin'"

50 Cent takes to the big screen in Jim Sheridan's ghetto melodrama. And? He cries. Don't laugh!

By Stephanie Zacharek

Nov 9, 2005 | On the surface, Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan seems like a weird choice to direct the acting debut of Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, the ghetto melodrama "Get Rich or Die Tryin'." Then again, Sheridan's movies often take place on battlegrounds that are ideological, actual or both: Several of his pictures, specifically "In the Name of the Father" (1993) and "The Boxer" (1998), are set against the arduous conflict in Northern Ireland, and even when the Troubles aren't a driving force in Sheridan's movies, they're at least a specter.

Even beyond that, Sheridan has always been interested in the way political realities mesh with the complexity of family life. In "In the Name of the Father," Pete Postlethwaite and Daniel Day-Lewis play a father and son, two members of the Guildford Four, three Irish men and one woman who were wrongfully imprisoned for pub bombings in 1974. Their prison scenes are a potent distillation of the tensions that so often arise between fathers and sons: Postlethwaite and Day-Lewis, forced to eat in their cell because of the other inmates' hostility, argue over little things that stand in for bigger things. Postlethwaite, with forced jocularity, tries to convince his son that the food isn't so bad; Day-Lewis shoots back that the two of them might as well be guilty -- at least they'd get some respect among their new peers. Together they represent an atypical and yet wholly recognizable family dinner table; the scene is a flash of domestic poetry that captures the way extreme circumstances both strengthen and strain family connections.

"Get Rich or Die Tryin'" (its script is by Terence Winter) is glancingly biographical, incorporating elements of Jackson's real-life story: He was born and raised in Queens (although the movie is set largely in the South Bronx) and he dealt drugs, served time and, at one point, nearly died after receiving multiple gunshot wounds; in between all of that, he worked long hours perfecting the rapper's art. But if nothing else, "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" is a family story: We first meet Jackson's character, Marcus, as he and his friends (among them Bama, played with whispery bravado by Terrence Howard) hold up a check-cashing outfit. The robbery almost goes awry, but after Marcus and his pals get away with the money, a gunman, his face masked by a cotton kerchief that's all the more sinister for looking so ordinary, guns him down.

As he waits to die, Marcus reflects on his life: We see him as a kid (played by Marc John Jefferies) with his mom (Serena Reeder), the two of them singing along, boisterously, to Chaka Khan on the car radio. When his mother, who keeps him in the latest sneakers by dealing drugs, is killed, Marcus is forced to live with his grandparents (played, wonderfully, by Viola Davis and Sullivan Walker) in their already too-crowded house. We know we're watching a Jim Sheridan movie when we see Marcus sitting down to the raucous family dinner table only to realize, too late, that one of his young cousins has cheekily snatched food off his plate, an act of mischievous competitiveness in a house (not to mention a world) where there's just too little of everything to go around.

Next Page: 50 Cent's brave tear

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