Whose House Is It?

The Last Black Man in San Francisco a film by Joe Talbot.  With Jimmie Fails, Jonathan Majors, Danny Glover, Tichina Arnold. ****1/2

The Last Black Man in San Francisco was for me a study in faces, the deeply expressive faces of not only its lead actors, but also every actor in the film, from the street preacher who opens it to the woman who plays (and actually is) Jimmie Fails’ mother.  Danny Glover plays a blind man, and I’ve never seen him in a more touching and expressive role.  The whole cast seems composed of veteran actors.  It’s astonishing to know that its two leads are starring in their first major roles.

The story is apparently that of Jimmie Fails’ life, which he has been wanting to film for years and which finally came to fruition with his longtime friend, director Joe Talbot.  During World War II, Japanese people in San Francisco were sent to internment camps, and houses in the Fillmore district were up for grabs.  Jimmie’s grandfather bought such a house—a huge magnificent house in the movie—in 1946.  His heirs inherited the place but weren’t able to keep up the payments.  Jimmie, in fact, was shunted off to a series of foster homes.  It was his lifelong dream to get back.  The Jimmie Fails in the movie, in fact, is so in love with the place that he takes care of and improves it, despite the fact that two aging white people live there.

Jimmie lives at his friend Mont’s place, owned by Mont’s aging and now blind uncle (Glover).  The two guys are cramped in a small bedroom, and the house is way out in the burbs, where the streets are treacherous and the water polluted.  The irony of the situation is not lost on them: the labor of black men helped build this city, but they can no longer live in it.  Jimmie won’t give up the dream, however, and travels by skateboard to the city every week to make minor improvements in the family house.  He paints the trim, though no one has asked him to, and though the people who live there try to get rid of him (he tries to go on days when they’re not around).  He feels ownership though the place isn’t his.

Jimmie is fascinating, but Mont (Jonathan Majors) in his own way is more so, an artist who is constantly sketching and listening to people, rehearsing dialogue.  He has aspirations as a playwright, is especially interested in the neighborhood gang bangers who congregate outside his uncle’s house.  They’re perpetually challenging one another’s manhood, getting ready for battle.  The irony is that there’s no masculine work to do; they’re all fired up (as men) with nowhere to go.  Another irony is that they’re friends; they actually like each other, and seem to be interesting—and verbally inventive—people.  They’re warriors with no one to fight, except each other.

Suddenly there’s a dispute over the Fillmore house among the heirs of the woman who owned it.  It’s the kind of dispute, over an aging, run-down property, that could go on for years.  The house is empty, and Jimmie and Mont move in.

I assume that part of the story is fantasy; they move into this huge beautiful house—it still holds some books that were in Jimmie’s family, and there’s an organ in it—and make it their own.  They meet with the realtor who will finally sell it, and eventually talk price with him.  Probably that part isn’t fantasy.  This run-down though magnificent place, in the Fillmore district, is selling for four million dollars.

San Francisco is a modern American city on steroids, but this is the story of so many cities, including the two I live in—Durham and Asheville, North Carolina—and the one I just visited, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  The case of Pittsburgh is especially interesting, because I stayed in a part of the city—East Liberty—that had been grand in my mother’s day, had become a dangerous slum in my day, and now is halfway to being gentrified, to the point where it’s schizophrenic to stay there.  I stayed at a hotel in the midst of streets I would once have been afraid to walk (though my family’s church was on one of those streets; we would park in the parking lot, walk straight into the church, and never stray), ate at some excellent restaurants that line those streets, but can still walk into a pawnshop or—as my nephew said—buy a wig.  The whole thing is mind boggling.  You wouldn’t want gentrification not to happen; the neighborhood was going down the tubes.  But you wonder about the people who once occupied it.

Eventually Jimmie’s dream comes crashing down: he swears that, despite the fact that he has little to put down on the house, he would never miss a payment, but there’s no way he can buy that house.  There has also, predictably, been a shooting among the gang at Mont’s house.  But Mont does finally write a play, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and stages it at the house in the Fillmore.  Characters from all over the movie, including Jimmie’s father and his aunt, show up.  Whether the play is a success or not is hard to say; it’s oddly unfinished, like this whole situation.  But the emotions definitely flare.

There’s a great scene toward the end in which a couple of white women on a bus, young women who are moving to San Francisco to join start-ups, are complaining about the place, and Jimmie calls them on it.  He says—completely to their stupefaction—that you can’t hate a city until you’ve also loved it, as he obviously has.  So many people are moving into these cities who have no idea what has happened in them in the past.  To them they’re just places to live.

But they’re much more than that.