1991: Tyra Ferrell in "Boyz n the Hood"
Monday, July 13, 2020 at 10:00AM
Before each Smackdown (and the next is for 1991), Nick Taylor suggests Supporting Actresses from an alternate ballot...
What do you call the experience of watching a film with only one or two Oscar nominations to its name and discovering it’s one of the most jaw-dropping, accomplished films of its year? Maybe the Academy honored strong, worthwhile films across the board, maybe it didn’t, but you’re still left wondering how this stone cold masterpiece only got a modicum of the attention it so richly deserved. Case in point for 1991 is Boyz n the Hood, where writer/director John Singleton earned an Original Screenplay nomination and made history as the first black filmmaker ever nominated for Best Director. Boyz n the Hood ranks among the best of an Academy vintage that's largely filled with formally impressive, generically diverse, time-tested films. Its inclusion is even more exciting considering how easily it might not have happened. Who knows what chance it had of cracking the technical categories given how prescriptive those fields are against films as small as Boyz? On the other hand, the inability of Ice Cube or Laurence Fishburne to make headway in that anemic Best Supporting Actor lineup is another matter entirely. But the real topic for today’s sermon is the equally deserving and less regularly heralded performance from Tyra Ferrell, doing the most startling work of the female ensemble from the film's edges...
Boyz n the Hood opens with ten-year-old Tre Styles being sent to live with his father Furious (Laurence Fishburne) in Crenshaw by his mother Reva (Angela Bassett) after he gets in a fight at school. Reva tells Furious “I can’t teach our son how to be a man. That’s your job. ”, a line that hangs over Furious and Tre for the rest of the film. Living across the street (and just as haunted by that notion) are Tre’s best friends, Doughboy and Ricky who are raised by their mother Brenda Baker (Tyra Ferrell). Seven years later grown Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is still living with his father and getting ready to go to college with his girlfriend Brandi (Nia Long), while Ricky (Morris Chestnut) is working to score high on the SATs and get an athletic scholarship. Ricky's brother Doughboy (Ice Cube) is simply trying to stay out of prison. Their everyday, edge of adulthood struggles are set in Southern L.A., against the backdrop of escalating gang violence and cops who are useless when they aren’t threatening, in the aftermath of two terms of President Reagan.
For all of Boyz n the Hood’s unambiguous declarations of theme and already weighty dilemmas, it’s remarkable how fully Singleton and his artists are able to deepen the film’s arguments. The cast is roundly committed to inhabiting their characters rather than playing stereotypes or kowtowing to likability. But where Boyz frequently stops for scenes of its men fraternizing and fighting and philosophizing, the women don’t get the same levels of attention from Singleton’s script. It’s one thing to watch Gooding Jr., Fishburne, and Ice Cube flourish with the considerable material Singleton gives them, but comparing what they have to work with, it’s almost more impressive to watch Bassett, Ferrell, and Long create such sturdy points of view in roles that seem designed primarily to orbit the men in their lives. Ferrell in particular is able to provide a full, layered characterization, making her own emotional and ethical claims on the film within the framework Singleton gives her.
Brenda is introduced in her most broadly written scene, berating 10 year-old Doughboy for not doing his chores before chatting up Tre on her porch until he leaves with her sons to explore. Ferrell doesn’t underplay Brenda’s anger at Doughboy or disguise her intentions when she speaks to Tre about Furious, but she also doesn’t vamp through it or milk her about-face for laughs. Her anger feels weary and fed-up but not indulgently scaled; it's like she’s had this conversation before and is tired of repeating herself. Her easiness with Tre is not just earnest but, as later scenes show, the more typical way Brenda interacts with other people. She’s a sharp, responsive person, fiercely direct in expressing herself but not easily provoked into acting demonstrative. Even when Doughboy is taken from her home arrested for shoplifting, she just takes a quick, dissatisfied look at the world around her, flicks away her cigarette, and retreats inside. It takes a lot to make her upset.
One of the first things we learn about Brenda is that she actively prefers Ricky to Doughboy. “Prefers” might be an understatement, given that she’s nurtured him since he was a boy to point him towards college, while holding no such ambitions for Doughboy. His friends suspect it’s because the two of them have different dads, and Brenda liked Ricky’s father better, though no one in the family bothers to explain it. It’s just a fact. Ferrell knows this too, and doesn’t waste time justifying Brenda’s choices or critiquing her favoritism. Instead, Ferrell lets Brenda’s bias emerge in gradations, sometimes finding other, complimentary reasons for why she’s reacting to one of her sons the way she is and foregrounding her preference explicitly. Her favoritism is a filter which completely informs her interactions with Doughboy and Ricky, yet Ferrell cuts such a shrewd, flinty observer that the audience can’t easily discount her point of view.
So, you can see why she might not take kindly to Doughboy calling the women at his welcome home party hoes (who threw it for him, I wonder?), though all she does to reprimand him is throw him a glare and slap his chest before telling everyone to be nice. Then again, when she smacks Doughboy in the face to stop him and Ricky from fighting and refuses to acknowledge him after they’ve stopped, you can’t quite picture her treating Ricky like that. Nor could you imagine her looking at Doughboy with any of the pride she is constantly emanating towards Ricky, the golden son who is so tantalizingly close to getting into college on an athletic scholarship and making something of himself, especially after the USC recruiter (John Cothran, excellent) comes to call. When Ricky suffers a hideous, irreparable setback, it's sadly fitting that she only seems able to accept it once she blames Doughboy, verbally and physically castigating him with all her strength. Boyz surely has a more rounded grasp of her son’s achievements and shortcomings, though this does nothing to diminish how Ferrell is able to conjure an entirely different perspective that still feels in line with what we know about these characters. Her investment in Ricky and dismissal of Doughboy doesn't feel rooted in projection or broad categorization but in lived experience, however compromised it might be.
Again, we're brought to Reva's declaration that only a father can truly raise his son, a line never explicitly related to Brenda but which hangs heavy over her house as the film progresses. How might we respond to her favoritism, to her conviction that everything she and Ricky have been working towards will pay off? How does this change once everything has gone disatrously wrong in spite those efforts? Singleton himself doesn't seem inclined to overtly indict her, though his more admirable depiction of Furious feels contrasted by how little Brenda is the actual focus of most of the scenes she's in. It's easy to imagine a less generous actress garishly leaning into the script's implicit ill will, but Ferrell's smartly controlled performance individualizes Brenda while giving her a credible point of view. Ferrell imbues her actions with as much thematic ramification as Boyz's most central players, without being reducible to the concepts put upon her by the film. Brenda, like everyone else, is simply trying to do right by hers, and that counts for a hell of a lot.
Reader Comments (14)
No kidding on that Supporting Actor field being anemic. Let's see what we have: The wrong Barton Fink supporting role (Mahoney, man), probably the wrong Harvey Keitel supporting role (Thelma and Louise), JFK's WORST IN SHOW (Sutherland, Oldman, Pesci and Candy, in that order, ALL would have been better mentions for that ensemble than Jones), Jack Palance in City Slickers (eh? I get why he won, considering what surrounded him, but outside of a stupidly anemic field like this, I can't imagine this winning, let alone being nominated) and Ben Kingsley (don't know how I'd feel, haven't seen Bugsy).
Note: The field I'd want, assuming foreign language performances are off the table, would probably look like:
Lawrence Fishburne, Boyz n the Hood
Ted Levine, The Silence of the Lambs
John Mahoney, Barton Fink
Gary Oldman, JFK
Donald Sutherland, JFK
(Note: Fishburne misses my actual ballot, but, well, my actual ballot has Jean-Claude Dreyfuss from Delicatessen on it.)
Let's not blame the Academy entirely.
It actually gave the film two top nominations, which is way better than the treatment it received from major critics and the Globes. Quite often, the Academy is badmouthed for some omissions but if people bother to look, precursors are no different. And precursors do matter. I wasn't around at the time, but given the precursors (Globes+DGA) and the countless articles I've read about it, the Academy's directors' branch went their own way by honoring this film and snubbing Streisand for her schmaltzy kitsch. It probably was something like snubbing Bradley Cooper to nominate Pawel Pawlikowski (though Cooper's film is much better than Streisand's). So I think the Academy did a good thing.
The question is why the actors' branch has not. This happened with Parasite as well. Actors simply are not brave voters. Most of the time they vote for what they've been told to vote, for what they're supposed to vote. This is why so often the acting nods are the least imaginative of the entire Oscar nods. In any given year.
@Zoooey: good points. Man, that was a really lame line-up for supporting actor in '91, whoa. (The 90s in general had a lot of lameness in a lot of categories).
Ted Levine as Buffalo Bill in SOTL is iconic and deserved a nomination (recognizing that the role is problematic). He creeped out whole generations of filmgoers.
@Volvagia - If we’re gonna nominate a JFK actor, I’d have gone with Sutherland, and if the Academy had any preference for male ingenues Brad Pitt would’ve made it here easy. What, they think those abs grow on trees?
@Zoooey - Believe me, I’m incredibly happy with these two nominations. I didn’t intend it as a badmouthing of the Academy, especially knowing Boyz got so little love elsewhere. It’s an inspired addition to both lineups, I just wish it could’ve made even more headway elsewhere. Like Lynch getting the lone Director nomination for Mulholland Drive, or Amy Adams being Junebug’s only representation - I’m so delighted they made it, they totally deserve it, wouldn’t trade it for the world . . . . but what about the rest of the film?
@Rob - Ted Levine missing will always sort of surprise me (and how close was Brooke Smith, I wonder?). I always misremember Silence as having a couple more nominations than it got.
@Nick: Indeed, Brooke Smith! A wonderful performance that deserved at least consideration. But I'm sure neither she nor Ted Levine had had any cache with the Academy and/or an agent powerful enough to *get* them any cache with the Academy. I remember it being extraordinary in itself that SOTL got as many noms as it did, let alone WINNING so many of the majors. An anomaly to be sure (and a weak year for BP in general, which certainly helped a solidly genre film like SOTL).
Supporting Actor always is the most disappointing list of acting performances and I don't know how one corrects it. It's the category that I agree the least with every year.
Love starting with BNTH as it's my fav from 91 and was overlooked majorly. The actors you've mentioned would've been much worthier than whomever they nominated in 91. Especially the men who would've been 100% better than the list of Palance, Keitel, Kingsley, Jones & Lerner.
I miss Singleton and wish we still had him around to make great features like this first one.
She is awesome.
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I miss Singleton too.
Yes, the 1991 supporting actor lineup is a bit of a puzzle. I think the Boyz N the Hood cast is excellent and I guess Laurence Fishburne would be the most obvious supporting actor nominee. Harvey Keitel should have got in for his terrific turn as the cop in Thelma & Louise rather than his gangster-by-numbers performance in Bugsy. But Elliott Gould in Bugsy is terrific and would have been a worthy nominee. Maybe Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs instead of lead? Certainly Ted Levine would have been a worthy inclusion. As for JFK, I quite like Tommy Lee Jones in it - it's very difficult to work out if Clay Shaw is putting on a performance to evade scrutiny or if he is being genuine, and that's testament to Jones's clever work - but I like Joe Pesci, Donald Sutherland and Kevin Bacon just as much.
For supporting actress, Tyra Ferrell would have been worthy too. Supporting actress was a stronger category that year than supporting actor, though, and so it's a little more difficult to see who she could have bumped. I think campaigning must have come into it (as it so often does): I don't remember seeing much visible campaigning on behalf of the Boyz N the Hood cast that season. But I do remember thinking that Singleton's directing nomination wasn't a big surprise. After Spike Lee's miss for Do the Right Thing two years earlier, it felt the tide was turning and Singleton had a chance - and how lovely that he got in.
Hopkins and Foster were the cream of the crop for Silence of the Lambs. The sequences inside the house between captor and captee could have been from any episode of Tales From the Crypt.
Tyra Farrell is criminally underrated. Also, see Jungle Fever and White Man Can't Jump.
Tyra Farrell is such an underrated actress! I'm always happy to see her when she pops up in movies, and she's also done great work on TV. Another name on the depressingly long list of Black actresses who have yet to get their due.
She was great in that film as she is this interesting character who is deeply flawed as she showed one love for her son despite the fact that he has a child and his girlfriend live with them while Doughboy was someone that needed love. Farrell is indeed an underrated actress as she was also great in Jungle Fever as this idea of companionship for John Turturro's character as he falls for her. It is the complete opposite of the character he played in Do the Right Thing which shows why Turturro is one of the best actors ever.
She is exotic excellence.
Gary Oldman was my fave supporter in JFK, but it would've made a nice career capper for Sutherland as well. And just like in 1993, Tommy Lee Jones was unjustly remembered when there were soooo many better performances to acknowledge.