Sugar Hill
A lot of black cinema in the 90s depicted the crack-cocaine crisis. So much so that one would think that the pitfalls of addiction only start when you add a little baking powder to it and smoke it — but that’s a conversation for another day. Sugar Hill is your quintessential dope boy movie but it seems to gets lost in the conversation. Especially since the main character, Romello, was played by Wesley Snipes. New Jack City came out just three years prior, so it’s easy to perceive the redundancy. Both films are apart of a trilogy of sorts that highlights street life in Harlem. If New Jack City aims to make us aware there’s a Nino Brown on every block and tells us decisive action must be taken to stop them, then Sugar Hill’s Romello reminds us of their humanity and asks exactly what that decisive action should be.
Sugar Hill opens with a searing trumpet, telling us what this is all about — what, at best, is nuanced, and at worst, bastardized to all hell — poverty. The mother’s traumatic death makes it clear the audience is now welcome to share the same mental state of hopelessness as the surviving characters. Despite this rough start, Romello, the younger brother, kept his wits about him and instead of accepting a scholarship to university, he chose to murder the man who tried to kill his father. He’s honest about his faults though as he tells us he’s grown up to be the exact monster he once despised. It’s unclear if older brother, Raynathan, had those same kind of opportunities but he’s his brother’s keeper regardless. The only difference in the brothers is that one is looking for a way out. Which is the only meaningful difference when you’re trying to do more than just survive.
Survival is the only function of their father, a man battling the demons of guilt and addiction. We don’t immediately look to his story as an example for survivors remorse but this movie reprimands those who do not do so. Romello recognizes this and offers empathy. It is only then that both characters can move towards healing. The needle we see casually soaking in the first few scenes with his father disappears as he continues to nurse him back to health. As we often see when we decide to do better though, this is just one of Romello’s hurdles on his journey out the hood. Raynathan, his older brother who wants to remain in the drug game, being the steepest. You would think with Raynathan being the oldest he’d be the push for change, but it’s the same time that could’ve served to make him wiser, actually working against him. Raynathan is bitter, and like most of us has lived long enough to see things change just enough for them to stay the same. So, by this time, in that penultimate scene where he serves up his father and his father shoots up, you’re numb. The audience is not told what to feel, only to watch what is.
Sugar Hill serves to show us the next chapter of a young man in Harlem. We can all agree that when you know better you should do better, but we all have different variations of better and come to know them at different times. The remedy for survival is to actually live. The hubris of Nino Brown matures into the discernment and pragmatism of Romello Skuggs. If New Jack City made an indictment, this film seeks to repeal it. Sugar Hill like the middle child only seems to get lost in conversation because there are no seemingly strong convictions, but it is because of this that we can start to answer questions posed by it’s predecessor. “So, what do we do with the Ninos, Roemellos and Raynathans?” We do nothing. Time will decide.
