FRESH sounds like another slice of low-life, a study of an intelligent but fatally disadvantaged ghetto child's inexorable descent into criminality. But if the situations are (at first) familiar, the characters aren't; they may look like the same old junkies and dealers and whores and
gangsters, but first-time director Boaz Yakin invests all of them--particularly Fresh (Sean Nelson)--with a subtle, complex life that's both painful and exhilarating.
On the mean streets of New York City, 12-year-old Fresh works as a courier for Esteban (Giancarlo Esposito), a drug dealer who functions as a surrogate father. His real father (Samuel L. Jackson), unemployed and embittered, has channelled a lifetime of frustration into mastering the game of
chess, in which he periodically instructs his son. Yakin's tightly plotted character study seems poised to follow a well-worn path: promising ghetto youth, desperate family, bad companions, violence and death, capped off with the usual dose of pat moralizing. Instead, FRESH offers a welcome
departure from well-worn themes and plot developments, as the title character launches a cold-blooded, intricately plotted scheme to rescue himself and the remnants of his family from the depredations of ghetto life.
FRESH stands on young Sean Nelson's performance, and he is so good it's hard to believe. Fresh is a complex and contradictory character, a boy who's simultaneously sophisticated and callow, naive enough to think life can be played like a board game and smart enough to do it and win, though at a
disturbing price. Yakin deserves special praise for endowing his characters with intellect--a quality that blacks are rarely allowed to display in Hollywood films--and for resisting the temptation to mar his quietly intelligent film with a commercially desirable hip-hop soundtrack. leave a comment
