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A Thousand and One
A Thousand and One
Released from Rikers Island as A Thousand and One begins, Inez takes the elevated train back to a bleak future in Harlem. She has no home to return to, no job waiting and no prospects. When Inez spots T, a six-year-old playing on the street outside the homeless shelter, she runs to him. “You don’t remember me?” she asks. The boy averts his eyes, ignoring her. “I’m staying out of trouble this time,” she pleads insistently.
When she learns that T fell from a window in his careless foster home, she visits the resentful boy at the hospital, shares a KitKat, denies his faded memory of being left alone by his mother on a street corner. Warming to her after a few visits, T is snatched from the hospital to live with Inez, who pays someone for false papers to identify the child. The kidnapping is duly reported by local media (Call Crime Stoppers with a tip!), but after all, it’s not as if a white suburban child had vanished. The story fades.
A Thousand and One, the feature debut by writer-director A.V. Rockwell, is a powerful dramatization of life at the low end of America’s economy. Inez is played by Teyana Taylor as an angry and determined force of nature, armored against insult and recrimination, hiding her tears from herself. Rockwell’s camera often looks up to her, emphasizing her centrality as a mother against the odds. The story spans 11 years, from 1994 to 2005, with believable young actors playing T at 6 (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), T at 13 (Aven Courtney) and T at the verge of 18 (Josiah Cross). A reluctant father figure emerges after his release from prison. Lucky (Will Catlett), gruff but not heartless, wants nothing to do with the boy at first (“What do I know about raising a family?”), but comes around soon enough. “We gonna get you the life we never had,” he eventually pledges to T.
A Thousand and One subverts the Hollywood convention of a second act problem solved in a glorious finale of hope and progress. Every scene has its problem, nothing is easy, and Inez takes her time absorbing the advice handed her early on: “Don’t waste time feeling sorry for yourself.” Her past is painful (the screenplay reveals just enough but no more), the chip on her shoulder is deep, but she moves forward with an agenda of hard work and family making. Lucky earned his name by never winning; he tries but his eye wanders and his legs follow. He’s in and out of their lives.
T is smart but not adorably Hollywood precocious. He acts up often and usually doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He has the judgment of a young person with uncertain role models. And he also faces a problem unknown in suburbia when repeatedly stopped and frisked by NYPD. Hovering over the film are voice overs by Rudy Giuliani, back before he became a malignant lawn gnome, when he was nationally respected for “cleaning up” New York’ and his successor, Mike Bloomberg, who polished the Big Apple to a shiny gleam. More sinister is the lurking presence of those disruptors who like to call themselves “urban developers” …
Rockwell nails the time and place, a sweaty setting of littered streets and smudgy payphones with a soundtrack of sirens, car alarms and commotion. Inez and Lucky are products of families that disintegrated before they could fully form, absorbing measures of self-loathing and defeatism, but trying, hoping for a future in a place where every step on the ladder is slippery.
A Thousand and One is screening at Marcus Southgate Cinema, Marcus South Shore Cinema, Marcus Ridge Cinema, AMC Mayfair, the Oriental Theatre, Marcus South Shore Cinema and Marcus North Shore Cinema.
