“G” is a movie based on a clever conceit. Take F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” the classic American novel about class, money and social striving, and give it a hip-hop setting.
The idea works, even if the movie doesn’t.
“Gatsby” is about a mildly disreputable bootlegger who joins the nouveau riche in order to impress Daisy, the girl who couldn’t marry “a poor boy.” He buys a house near hers in the Hamptons and conspires to lure her there so she can be impressed. Maybe she’ll leave her lout of a husband, Tom, for him, now that he’s made it.
“G” is about exactly the same thing. Summer G (Richard T. Jones) is a hip-hop impresario with the bling, the babes and the Bentleys to prove his status. He’s throwing the best parties in the Hamptons.
And it’s all to impress Sky (Chenoa Maxwell), who left him back in college (the Fashion Institute of Technology, no less) for a lawyer named “Chip” (Blair Underwood).
Her cousin is the guy who brings the two ex-lovers back into contact. In “Gatsby,” this poor-relation narrator is Nick. Here, he’s Tre (“That’s Tracy!”), a reporter blandly played by Andre Royo. He is caught in Sky’s marital gamesmanship (Chip is cheating) as he tries to land the big interview with Summer G.
There are other cheaters, other relationships orbiting around this triangle. And this being hip-hop, you know there are guns. It’s just a question of who will be shot by whom, once the infidelity hits the fan.
Underwood is the best thing in the film, capturing all of the physical menace and arrogance of great wealth, a shallow man who wants people to know that “I know some Negroes.” The rest of the cast fails to generate the heat or empathy that their roles require.
The movie was shot on the cheap in 2002, and the best you can say about it is that the Hamptons have never looked so ugly. Clothier Ralph Lauren’s son Andrew has a role in it, came up with the story, and produced the film, though plainly he needed more cash for better film stock and a better cinematographer.
G is introduced too soon, and followed too closely, to create the “Gatsby mystique” that should surround this tortured soul who misses his Daisy. Jones could use some of that mystique to make his G interesting. Maxwell makes a less passive, more mercenary Daisy/Sky than in the book, and Tre is even duller than the simple observer Nick.
All the peripheral dramas and failing relationships distract from the heartbreak and emptiness of wealth and the wealthy that are at the story’s core.
Does it work on its own merits, as a tricky and bloody love triangle? Not really. The hunger, longing and ambition driven by lost love are played too flatly.
And you should never make a movie about boundless, conspicuous wealth on an indie budget. “G” may have the bling, but it doesn’t have the glitter of the world it tries to capture.
