If you like Lupe Fiasco, you stand a good chance of liking Filly Brown even if the story and the writing is sub-par.
The family that writer Youssef Delara places at the core of Filly Brown makes a remarkable starting point. Young Majo Tonorio (aka Filly) is the default matriarch of her family while her mother, Maria, serves a time in prison on drug charges. She struggles to simultaneously befriend and parent her younger sister and receives strenuously mixed messages from her father about where his loyalties lie. Bizarrely, he and Majo's maternal uncle are both reluctant to help get Maria out of prison and their reasons become Majo's first and steepest learning curve.
But Delara, who co-directs with Michael Olmos, doesn't keep this family at the core of his film, instead he focuses on what was probably the pitch that got it funded: Majo is a promising rapper who “spits out poems” brilliantly but isn't sexy enough in lyrics or image to get a record deal. Inevitably, she compromises what she needs to and gets a swanky producer who makes a lot of promises. Her motivation however, brings us back to that great family and it becomes apparent that the elements of art, politics and relationships that Delara and Olmos try to combine have not quite married in this film.
I found myself wanting to really like this actress, but while Gina Rodriguez may well be a fine performer, this is not a well-written part. While it gives her a good range of emotions to work with, the lines she gets are poor. We see her hopeful, we see her struggle, her relationships with the men and women in her family are cleverly varied and she is brilliantly heartbroken and betrayed by her mother. Physically Rodriguez does excellently but the writing rests so heavily on the stylistics of slang to convey emotion that it forgets the content and becomes clichéd.
The storyboard is even worse. Events and scenes may as well come with sub-headings, they are that functional. There's a smidge of sex which leads to a lot of violence and among all the heavy drama that lies only inches away from wannabe gangster territory, the big reveal about Majo's mother is swallowed.
There are elements of Filly Brown that hint at Delara's writing potential. Majo's first small time producer, Raybourn, played knowingly but light-heartedly by Chingo Bling, is superbly written. He is funny, slightly scary in his exploitation of others and wisely only a small part in this film. But he is one of too many small parts that if lost would give Filly Brown the focus and momentum it needs.
Image: Jenni Rivera in Filly Brown by John Castillo.jpg
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