Michael Phillips | Chicago Tribune
The title of writer and director A.V. Rockwell's gripping drama "A Thousand and One" is nailed to a Harlem apartment door: 10-01. The hyphen fell off a long time ago.
Behind that door, with a fast-gentrifying city encroaching from the outside, lives Inez, formerly incarcerated, now living with her son, Terry. But freedom is relative, always. Over the course of a decade, Inez's life as a mother, a wife and a keeper of a secret makes for a narrative fraught with danger and potential loss. "A Thousand and One," this year's top jury prize winner at the Sundance Film Festival, puts you through it, but with real feeling, real stakes and an authentic vision guided by a fiercely commanding performance by Teyana Taylor as Inez.
We first see her behind bars on Rikers Island, doing a fellow inmate's hair — Inez is a hairdresser — and then outside, on her own. She has what one character calls a petty-thief rap sheet "as long a … sidewalk."
The year is 1994. Once back on familiar streets, she spies a 6-year-old boy, Terry, living in foster care, as Inez herself did as a child. Terry is her son, we soon learn. Rockwell's story works from a simple, risky mission: to sneak Terry out of protective foster care and back into her life, as mother and son, hiding from the police, trying to make the best of it.
"Moonlight" style, though in an utterly different, rougher stylistic milieu, "A Thousand and One" keeps Terry at the center of things as much as Inez. He's played by three actors at three ages, at 6 (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), 13 (Aven Courtney) and 17 (Josiah Cross), with remarkable seamlessness. Terry's a kid who burrowed into himself at an early age out of emotional protection. Throughout his adolescence, once Inez's lover Lucky (William Catlett, playing it artfully right down the middle) gets out of prison and becomes a father figure of ambiguous loyalties, the boy exists in a life lived on ever-shifting ground. Yet there are glimmers of hope, and love.
There's a gutting element of suspense in Rockwell's film. At some point, you know and dread that Inez's de facto kidnapping of her son will come back around for a reckoning. Terry's a sharp-witted student, with a real future; Inez will do anything to ensure it.
Through the years, the city remakes itself under Mayors Bloomberg and Giuliani, whose declarations of a better, brighter, implicitly richer and whiter New York City periodically fill the soundtrack. At one point, teenage Terry and his friend run afoul of the NYPD stop-and-frisk routine, and it's handled with sobering matter-of-factness.
The storyline, worked out in the Sundance Lab program, has its knotty and sometimes fuzzy elements, mostly feeding into the setup of the eventual reveal of Inez's long-guarded secret. But I love how Rockwell handles the passing years in "A Thousand and One" so we feel time passing in a blur of little moments and big ones. Also, I love how the movie takes the time to linger with one character (Terry, alone while his mother works, getting into low-level trouble at the apartment) or another. Sometimes the script resorts to an expedient thesis line that plays a mite falsely — "What do two crooks know about raising a family?" Lucky asks Inez at one point — but the movie has a way of getting right back on track.
Rockwell builds it all around a prickly, fascinating character. Taylor seeks the truth in Inez every second, and there's no unearned redemptive nonsense thrown in to make it an easy heartwarmer. What Inez and Lucky and Terry learn may be a redemption story, but not a facile one. The movie, which concerns the travails and rewards of family no less than any number of other Sundance-sprung award-winners including "CODA," is a work of lived-in experience, and a fully dimensional sense of place and people.
Rockwell's short films include the Alicia Keys video "The Gospel" and narratively driven and terrific "Feathers." Working with her cinematographer, Eric Yue, the light and shadow of Inez's life are made literal but casually so. A naturally fluid and kinetic presence, Taylor seizes the day while banking a lot of the heavy emotion in "A Thousand and One." The longtime musician, performer and dancer this time is plainly more exposed emotionally than she's ever needed to be on screen. It's a performance of careful builds and accumulated heartbreak, underneath Inez's protective shell. She's dazzling in a consciously undazzling way here.
Taylor grew up in Harlem; Rockwell was raised in Queens. Their city, Rockwell said in a Slant interview, came through the late '90s and early 2000s in "a way that doesn't serve the citizens and the communities that already existed here. It seems to be getting better just so other people (can) feel like it's more palatable and inviting for them to come in and push the rest of us out." That's the backdrop for Inez's story, and Terry's. And it's being told in countless cities outside of New York.
"A Thousand and One" — 3.5 stars (out of four)
MPA rating: R (for language)
Running time: 1:56
How to watch: In theaters Friday March 31.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
mjphillips@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @phillipstribune
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