In the opening scenes of Misty Green, a new film from Chris Rock, a Black actor starts to perform her lines in an audition for the role of Andy Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada. The whimsical, pastel color palette of the scene collides with her deadpan recitation of lines meant to convey nervous excitement. If this unevenness weren’t uncomfortable enough, Misty’s nose suddenly starts to bleed down to her white button-up shirt. It goes without saying that she doesn’t get the role. She hasn’t gotten much of anything as of late, and she is in a very bad place.
Misty Green is an out-of-work, Emmy award-winning Black actor with substance abuse issues and a penchant for affairs with married men. The propulsion for the film is that the widow of one of her now dead lovers is kicking her out of the luxury waterfront property that Misty claims was gifted to her by him. Misty, who’s played by Rosalind Eleazar, has seven days to find a new job so that she won’t become homeless. In a different director’s hands, this plot could have been a comeback story in which false starts lead to eventual triumph, making for a traditional feel-good movie. But with Rock’s treatment, the premise isn’t compelling enough to sustain a feature-length film.
At the start of the movie, Rock establishes the film’s setting better than he establishes the lead character. In a voiceover, Misty describes “the bag”, or the money that she’s chasing, followed by a photographic montage of Los Angeles icons interspersed with harsh realities: the luxe Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel followed by a homeless encampment, Venice Beach and In-N-Out Burger, wildfires before a rapid transition to a billboard promoting thinness. Hollywood is full of beautifully packaged contradictions. Rock issues the same amount of contradiction to Misty; however, he falls short in facilitating an emotional connection between her character and the audience.
In one scene, for instance, Misty laments to her best friend, Naomi, played by Anna Kendrick, that she deserves a well-paying gig because she’s talented, yet repeatedly turns down Naomi’s suggestions for whom to contact and where to audition. When Misty finally finds an open role that piques her interest, she indulges in an all-night coke bender before her audition the next morning. Without any meaningful insight as to why she self-sabotages, it is difficult to empathize with her character. Chasing “the bag” is not a sufficient reason for a viewer to continue watching a marginally entertaining movie without much else to say. It’s difficult to have faith in a leading lady who is emotionally adrift and erratic for the majority of the film. Who exactly is Misty Green?
Rock has been focusing on Black women in his work as a means to convey institutional inequality for decades. He showed the ups and downs of marriage in the 2007 film I Think I Love My Wife and the race discrimination towards Black women’s hair in the 2009 documentary Good Hair. While those two efforts were measured and thoughtful, Misty Green is scattered and superficial. In the aforementioned works, we hear and see Black women who are psychologically complicated because of and in opposition to the barriers that prevent them from feeling seen and affirmed. In Misty Green, that depth is glaringly absent. Rock, who plays the director Jordan Green, does too much of the legwork to belabor to the audience the problems within Hollywood: the futility of audition tapes, the shoddy pay and the narrow opportunities for Black artists. At the same time, there is an overemphasis on the system without much examination of the woman navigating it.
In one of the most tender scenes of the film, Jordan and Misty are dining out, and the line between business meeting and a romantic date is blurred. The warm-colored lighting evokes a sense of intimacy as they poke fun at their mistreatment as Black creatives. Misty tells Jordan about her struggles growing up as a biracial girl, with the film leaning on the recognizable and overdone trope of the “tragic mulatto”. The admission aims to evoke pity, but lands as simply another detail in how much she has suffered. Misty has no real community, no money and no passion towards acting whatsoever besides an angry, relentless need to prove something to others.
By saddling her character with hardship after hardship, Rock leaves no breathing room where Misty’s humanity can emerge and the story can subsequently expand. Instead, Misty is the stereotypical “mule” – the Black woman who shoulders all burdens – without demonstrating her selfhood through resistance or, at the very least, self-reflection. Eleazer delivers a fine performance, given the material, but her efforts gradually become monotonous. The film moves along, but Misty remains static.
In an interview about the film, Rock says that he stole from movies like Legally Blonde and Dumb and Dumber, where audiences believe they are watching dumb characters who are actually smart. “So I knew Misty had to be great,” Rock says. “You can’t just be a fuck-up.” The difference in those aforementioned movies is that they have heart: the lead characters had arcs where they, alongside the audiences, discover something bigger than their initial objectives. Misty Green doesn’t accomplish this. Female characters don’t have to be likable, but audiences need to understand their fears and desires in order to have an investment in the story.
Rock tries to add layers to Misty’s personality through a severely underutilized Daniel Kaluuya, who plays her mentally ill brother, Jay. But even their bond and history of shared trauma is gratuitous and tacked-on. Audiences don’t understand until the last 20 or so minutes of the film why his presence is crucial to her character and how he influences a morally dubious decision she eventually makes. These expository details are presented as flashes across the screen rather than interwoven revelations within the overall narrative. Their tragedy could’ve been an entry point that would’ve made for a better, more textured film. But in the end, Rock is too reliant on pain as the vehicle for a Black character’s narrative momentum.
