Higher Learning
First screened in January 2025
Director: John Singleton. Cast: Omar Epps, Michael Rapaport, Kristy Swanson, Tyra Banks, Laurence Fishburne, Ice Cube, Jennifer Connelly, Cole Hauser, Regina King, Busta Rhymes, Bradford English, Jason Wiles, Adam Goldberg, Jay R. Ferguson, Randall Batinkoff, Kari Wuhrer, Bridgette Wilson, Talbert Morton, Trevor St. John, Andrew Bryniarski, John Walton Smith Jr. Screenplay: John Singleton. In Brief:
Thematic ambitions, tied to topics that matter, but the filmmaking, structure, and ensemble acting keep faltering.
VOR:③
Even if execution seems to stumble twice for every time it steps right, I gladly grant its nervy goals and expansion of Singleton's canvas.
Even before his untimely demise at 51, John Singleton's career was such a knot of triumph, mourning, and hope. Almost nobody gets off easy debuting at 23 with an enduring masterpiece that's also a commercial juggernaut. Of the movies that followed for a decade, when it was most possible to see him as a filmmaker with real sway over his path and his projects, nothing felt like a bullseye but everything had something to say for it: the plangent tone of Poetic Justice, with its powerful performances from Tupac Shakur and Regina King; the polish, historical ambition, and fiery force of Rosewood; the scary/comic genius of Jeffrey Wright in a mostly cynical and negligible reboot of Shaft; the palpably personal quality of Baby Boy, even in its most awkward passages and gestures. All suggested a Singleton working hard to stave off a total absorption into corporatized cinema.
Higher Learning, released 30 years ago this month, is the movie from this period that's hardest to make a case for. I'll grant that even this one bears some sense of feeling personal, for a filmmaker so freshly hatched from USC and for a guy clearly pondering racial, sexual, and ideological trends of his era. More youth-targeted films should take such risks and extend dramatic opportunities to so many up-and-coming actors at a precarious moment when trajectories might be headed north or south. Higher Learning doesn't lack for hungry collaborators or for things to be about. If anything, in the two hours to which its original, grander script was abruptly reduced, it's bitten off more than almost any movie can chew.
Timorous bosses and "commercial" pressures surely played in the movie's ultimate, inarguably ungainly shape—as if a short but bad movie is always a better box-office prospect than a long but involving one! Still, Singleton's work and that of most collaborators looks unready and unsteady here, even in shards. The images, devised jointly by Singleton with Poetic Justice cinematographer Peter Collister (headed later toward Deuce Bigalow and Surviving Christmas) struggle throughout in lighting, blocking, and framing. The curation and the timing of soundtrack cuts are often wobbly in a film that nonetheless leans strongly into its music. Several ill-equipped performers get exposed in all their limitations (Swanson and Rapaport in particular), and even the promise on paper of reuniting with Ice Cube and a dubiously accented Laurence Fishburne is undone by Singleton's consigning of both to blurry half-facsimiles of their iconic Boyz N the Hood characters.
The breadth of the movie's tapestry is admirable, but the filmmaker's highly differential grasp of these people's interiorities and outward experiences never stops feeling conspicuous. Dropoffs are steep the further we get from black hetero masculinity, and the chauvinism that bleeds even from Singleton's best work is repeatedly a problem: in the staging and aftermath of a rape; in jittery, ultimately bashful approaches to feminist organizing and desire between women; in the thinness of screen time and detailed writing for the few black women in or near the mix. Even Omar Epps's Malik, though, doesn't radiate the clarity or texture of conception that Singleton typically achieves with figures closest to his heart or his perspective. Higher Learning has daring dreams for itself but just keeps flailing in mise-en-scène (those screen-filling U.S. flags!), in cross-cut structure, and in climactic action. The latter entails multiple melodramatic demises for exactly the characters you'd guess, followed by a wan moment of coerced "connection" between two figures unlikely to feel any.
Meanwhile and mostly, as if we needed any reminder in our current times, Higher Learning corroborates the tireless maxim that a huger-than-huge percentage of all commentaries in all mediums regarding What's Going on at College Campuses These Days, especially when hailing from people not currently working, studying, or living on campuses, is a florid hyperbole best approached with caution, if approached at all. Singleton thankfully avoids the extremities of just making stuff up, or signal boosting only what he or a projected "we" wants to hear. Higher Learning has legitimate questions on its mind, and a smattering of good scenes where they get raised, if not quite explored. But the film didn't persuade too many folks back in '95, and I wish I could say it's stepped into its moment or its authority now. Grade:C–
