dir. Tim Story
Opens Fri Sept 13 at various theaters.
Many critics with leftist or Marxist commitments will be appalled by Barbershop. The film's humor, acting, and politics are coarse; its laughter is not for the head or the heart but the belly, and other, lower parts of the body. This is the laughter of the folk, as Russian critic Bakhtin explained in his wonderful book on Rabelais and his world (16th-century France). Though the folk in Barbershop are not rural but urban (it's set in South Chicago), the laughter is the same: crass, corporal, and messy.
Starring two popular rappers, Ice Cube and Eve, Barbershop is about a young man (Ice Cube) who reluctantly runs a barbershop he inherited from his recently departed father. He has big ambitions and so does not recognize the social importance of the small business. Near the start of the working day, he decides to sell it to a ghetto capitalist (Keith David), settle the business' debts, and pursue his dreams. Near the end of the working day, he realizes the social value of the barbershop and decides to keep it. There are other subplots but they are not worth mentioning.
The best parts of the movie take place in the barbershop--the locus of laughter and general idiocy. Cedric the Entertainer, who plays the patriarch of the barbershop, is the primary generator of this humor, which is often mixed with comments on the state of things in black America. None of his assessments of past or current events are thought through clearly; in fact, the most complete or sophisticated argument in the movie concerns the scientific difference between good booty and bad booty.
Barbershop is not for the elite, or the middle or professional class (Signs being the best current example of middle-class entertainment), but for the working class. It inspires the working class' bottom-heavy laughter, and if that type of laughter shames Marxists, then whatever revolution they have in mind will never include those who are actually affected by the evils of corporate capitalism.
