Selah and the Spades (2020)
dir. Tayarisha Poe
Rated: R
image: ©2020 Amazon Studios
There is one scene in Selah and the Spades that gets to the root of writer/director Tayarisha Poe’s tale of control and the damage caused by an insatiable thirst for power. It comes late in the film, and it’s between the titular high school senior Selah and her young protégé, Paloma. It’s a test of loyalty. Selah’s unrivaled power as the head of the Spades is in question. The Spades is the most powerful of the five factions – think the five families in The Godfather – serving up every vice you could think of to the students of a well-to-do Pennsylvania boarding school.
Selah asks Paloma to prove her fealty. The scene perfectly captures – in no small part thanks to the performance of Lovie Simone, who plays Selah – just how drunk our hero is on her own power. We see Paloma in the next scene, walking in a daze with bloody knuckles. She has done what Selah asked. She has, in this moment, anyway, passed the test.
If only the rest of Selah and the Spades was as focused and compelling as that one scene.
This is Tayarisha Poe’s feature film directorial debut. Her stylistic choices show a great amount of promise. I look forward to seeing what she does next. The issues I had with Selah and the Spades were with the writing. The film wants to say too much about the modern high school experience, and as a result, it lands on an issue for no more than a scene before moving on to the next one.
In one admittedly well executed sequence, Selah explains to Paloma – but using direct address to the camera, she’s really explaining it to us – how everyone in the world tries to control seventeen-year-old girls. Other boys at school, the teachers, even a girl’s own mother are all in fierce competition to make decisions about how she can dress, act, and what she can do with her own body. This statement is connected to Poe’s wider theme of power in the film, but it’s held in laser focus for just these few minutes, then dropped, never to be mentioned again.
Other plot elements in the picture are so toothless as to undercut the serious tone that Poe is trying to build. The senior prank that the upper-level students stage early in the film is a good example. The five factions that dominate life at Haldwell Prep. provide services ranging from cheating on exams, gambling on Haldwell sporting events, and suppling students with any alcohol or drug imaginable.
Their idea of a senior prank is considerably tamer.
They meticulously place hundreds of plastic cups filled with water onto every inch of a school staircase. The whispers that Poe and her sound design team layer onto the soundtrack as the students perform their prank make it seem all the sillier instead of ominous, which was probably what was intended.
The screenplay also suffers from being terminally overwrought and overwritten. In a scene that serves as our only extended window into Selah’s home life, we see her interact with her domineering mother. Wonderful character actor – and everybody’s favorite second-in-command aboard the firefly-class ship Serenity – Gina Torres does her best with the most pretentiously written version of the fable “The Scorpion and the Frog” that I’ve ever heard.
When you add that to things like a throwaway line about Selah studying Modern Socialization in the Surveillance Era – “it’s like art meets social studies,” she tells Paloma – the movie gets dangerously close to self-parody.
The fact that Selah and the Spades is set in the world of high school doesn’t help that general feeling. I realize I’ve been out of that world for over two decades now, but have things become so much more dire since then? The movie takes these characters and their problems seriously, which is commendable, but it often feels like a touch much. I was reminded throughout Selah and the Spades of another high-school-set drama, Rian Johnson’s Brick. The overwrought – and, again, overwritten – nature of that movie had the same effect on me as this one.
Writing kid characters to speak like adults is a bit of a high-wire act. Leaning too hard into the seriousness of it all risks it becoming laughable. At one point in Selah and the Spades, Maxxie, Selah’s right-hand-man and second-in-command confronts his leader when she starts to groom Paloma to take over her operation. “She doesn’t know how the world works yet,” Maxxie intones to Selah. Exactly, I thought with a chuckle. None of you do. That’s what makes it so hard to take any of this too seriously.
Why it got 3 stars:
- I wasn’t sold on the world that Tayarisha Poe built here, but it’s a promising movie nonetheless. Poe shows off a stylistic flair in Selah and the Spades that I’m eager to revisit in her future work.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The casting is solid. These actors all actually look like high school students, instead of actors in their early- to mid-twenties playing high school students.
- Besides Gina Torres in her one-scene cameo, the movie also features a few brief appearances by Jesse Williams as the Haldwell Prep. headmaster. I love Williams for both his acting ability and his politics. It’s a shame he is given virtually nothing to do here.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Week five of every theater in the country being shut down. Amazon – and a very helpful marketing rep. – rode to the rescue for me. If only Amazon were as nice to their warehouse workers as they are to me…