More than 70 years ago, two tiny hamlets stood virtually side by side at the edge of the central Florida swamps. One of them, Sumner, was populated completely by whites. The other, Rosewood, more prosperous and civilized, was almost entirely black. During the first week of 1923, the citizens of the former community rose up against the latter, razing most of it, killing many of its residents and driving off the rest of them. In a matter of days, a ghost town was created.
Even in an era when lynchings were commonplace in the South, this genocidal frenzy was astonishing in its barbarism. Equally remarkable is the fact that it was banished from history for more than a half-century, until a newspaper reporter stumbled on the story in 1982. Since then there have been television and magazine accounts of this outrage, and now director John Singleton has made a film that is bound to arouse controversy over its approach to this tragedy.
For in shaping Rosewood, he and screenwriter Gregory Poirier have commingled the relatively few known facts of this matter with a lot of very obvious, very movieish fictions. Some of this was doubtless inevitable. Like the terrible end of the story, its ludicrous beginnings--a trampy white woman falsely accuses an anonymous black man of brutally assaulting her, thereby whipping up a mob spirit in Sumner--is known and powerfully shown. What is not available in the historical records is anything very specific about the people, victims and victimizers alike, who lived this story. Nor, apparently, does it offer a suitably heroic figure on whom to center audience attention or a suspenseful and emotionally releasing climax.
The moviemakers therefore create a character named Mann (Ving Rhames), who drifts into town on horseback just as the tragedy is beginning to unfold. In essence, he's the mysterious stranger of a thousand westerns, eager to avoid conflict but miraculously adept at the killing arts when he is finally obliged to employ them. Ultimately he and John Wright (Jon Voight), the white storekeeper in the town and a reality-based character, make common, inspiring cause to rescue Rosewood's surviving women and children from the swamp where they have taken refuge from the blood-crazed posse searching for them. There is some historical truth to this passage, but not to the well-staged, high-impact action sequence that brings the film to an end. In fact, the psychologically devastated survivors of the massacre embraced silence and anonymity until the few still remaining began talking to investigators in the early '80s.
Ordinarily such trespasses against truth would be enough to condemn such a movie, but Rhames' gravity and grace, Voight's pinched anguish as he wills himself to do right, the moving work of actors like Don Cheadle and Esther Rolle do much to redeem this film for human if not historical reality. Rosewood finds, in a shameful bygone moment, sources of pride for contemporary audiences. There are worse things to do with the past.
--By Richard Schickel