ROB PEACE - Mark Reviews Movies

Rob Peace, Republic Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 15, 2024

Everything should have gone right for Robert DeShaun Peace, whose story is dramatized in Rob Peace. In the movie, he's an intelligent kid who becomes an even more intelligent young man, earning his way into Yale University with the aspirations of achieving a doctoral degree and leading research that would help to fight aggressive forms of cancer. Such dreams are challenging enough, and the story of writer/director Chiwetel Ejiofor's movie is about how those goals weren't enough for this man because of the circumstances of his life.

There's a key point here that the filmmaker clearly doesn't want to be known beforehand, if only because the opening credits note a book by Jeff Hobbs as the source of Ejiofor's screenplay, although the actual title isn't provided until the end. One could find this information, of course, but that would give away what happens in this tale. It feels strange to speak of a real person's life and fate as some kind of twist that needs to be protected from a potential audience, and maybe that thinking on the part of the filmmakers is some of the reason this movie feels a bit distanced from its subject.

The main part, however, is that Ejiofor does focus primarily on what happens to the movie's version of Rob, instead of giving us much sense of who he is beyond the difficulties he faces at seemingly every turn of his life. It's a harrowing story, told with a degree of thoughtfulness about how Rob drives himself toward what seems to be inevitable success initially and, as the situation around him becomes more complex, toward a series of increasingly perilous choices. In his mind, he has no other choice, and without specifically saying what actually happens by the end of the story, that's what makes it so tragic.

Some narration from Rob, played as an adult by a charismatic and considered Jay Will, gives us the basic background of his life's ambition. As a kid, his father's house burnt down, leaving the child to consider the concept of cause and effect, ultimately leading him toward an interest in science. As a child (played by Jelani Dacres), Rob impresses his father Skeet Douglas (Ejiofor) with his ability to adjust baseball statistics on the fly, and as a young teenager (played by Chance K. Smith), he's helping his mother Jackie (Mary J. Blige) keep the household budget on track when one of her multiple jobs starts reducing hours.

Money is always an issue for the family, especially when Jackie decides to enroll her son in a local Catholic school. The good-hearted and responsible Rob helps out by doing odd jobs around neighborhood and ensuring that his grades stay high enough so that the school will pay for his college tuition when the time comes. Rob does get into Yale, begins what he thinks will be a prosperous academic career in earnest, works to pay for everything outside of tuition, and becomes a lab assistant so that he can get a leg up on future learning.

That's the optimistic side of this story. The major complication in Rob's life, though, comes earlier, when Skeet is arrested for and, after a years-long trial, convicted of murdering two women in his apartment building. He insists on his innocence, but without any money to pay for an attorney and the appeal process, Rob takes it upon himself to look into the case and figure out how to get his father released from prison.

Gradually, Skeet comes to depend on his son's help, and because he is and wants to be a good son, Rob now has to balance everything else in his life with his father's legal challenges. The pressures of school, the court system, his father's expectations, and his future become more of a burden for Rob than sources of pride, inspiration, and potential.

Just as with its protagonist, the movie is balancing a lot, raising issues of systemic corruption in the legal system, of racial bias in academia and the scientific fields (Rob wants to rise above or ignore them, asserting that he's only at Yale to learn, but they keep creeping into the story in assorted ways that he sometimes can't avoid), and of housing concerns in Rob's New Jersey hometown. Given the story's timeline, that last one becomes an unexpected obstacle that, despite Rob's logical way of looking for what could go wrong, just adds to the "chaos" of the man's life.

Generally, the balance here is sound, mainly because Ejiofor frames Rob's story as one of cause and effect—how the father's conviction and reliance on Rob come to define so much of his behavior, how his desire to help his local community bring him back home, how his need for money to help his father and that goal of reviving the neighborhood take him to use his knowledge of chemistry in a particular way. The movie finds a solid level of sympathy for this young man, simply because so many forces push and pull him in one direction.

Surely, though, there is more to Rob—and was more to the real Peace—than simply what happens to him as a matter of his circumstances. Rob Peace makes us comprehend how and why this story unfolds, but in framing the character in that way, it's missing a sense of the person behind his situation.

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