“A Thousand and One,” One of the Best Films of 2023
It’s tough to summarize “A Thousand and One” without giving too much away because there are some surprising twists, especially in the last quarter of this almost two-hour film. But this much can be revealed about one of former President Obama’s ten favorite films of last year: It’s primarily about a Black woman, Inez (Teyana Taylor), who at age 22 returns to Harlem after being released from Rikers Island after a year and a half of incarceration.
The rest of the movie deals mainly with her relationship with child Terry, who while she was in prison was cared for by a foster mother. Who and where Terry’s father was while Inez was in jail is not revealed. The film covers the years 1994 to 2005, while Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg were mayors of New York, and Terry is played by three different actors at three different stages—ages 6, 13, and 17.
Besides Terry, there is Lucky (William Catlett), who was also in prison and Inez later marries, making him a stepfather to Terry. At first he resents his new stepson, telling Inez, “That’s not my fucking kid. I just wanted you.” But after he marries Inez he tells Terry (still around six years old), “I promise to protect you and your mother....We’re going to give you the life that we never had.” He also puts a chain with a gold cross around Terry’s neck, which remains there for the rest of the film.
Later on, while outside shooting basketball (and Terry is now 13), Lucky stops to hug his stepson and tell him, “I love you. You hear me?” And Lucky tries to, partly by giving him advice like “don’t get caught up in none of this shit that you see around here.” It “took me too long to learn that. I don’t want to see you fall into the same traps as me and your mother. I want you to make better choices than me.” For his part, Terry seems to be making some good decisions. He transfers to a better high school and plans to go to college.
But life is not easy for Terry despite the love of Lucky and Inez, who towards Terry is a more constant and tough-love giver than her husband. Regarding Terry, Lucky tells her, “You’re too tough.” But Inez implies to him that she’s that way because she’s fearful for the boy. “Something’s gonna happen. I can feel it...Did he tell you he got stopped by the cops again? A few times.”
Apparently Terry did nothing wrong, but under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, as a newsperson announces in the film, there was a “crackdown on low-level offenses,” and there were more police stops.
Inez’s fears remind us of the many worries that a Black mother might have for a teenage son living in a poorer area: police stops, getting in trouble with the law, getting shot, getting a decent education, etc.
Former President Obama’s appreciation for the film is understandable in light of his background. Once a community organizer in Chicago, as a U. S. senator he later wrote The Audacity of Hope in which he stated that empathy was a quality which he found himself “appreciating more and more.” “It is,” he stated, “at the heart of my moral code, and it is how I understand the Golden Rule—not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else's shoes and see through their eyes.”
To fully appreciate “A Thousand and One” such empathy is necessary. The first-rate acting of Teyana Taylor, the first-time directing of A. V. Rockwell, and the broad sweep of the depiction of one woman’s life in Harlem during the mayoral years of Guilliani and part of Bloomberg’s stint are certainly pluses. But it is only through empathy, by standing in Inez’s shoes and seeing through her eyes, that we can fully experience the movie’s value.
Recommended for You
One of my favorite quotes—it’s attributed to various authors—is “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” And Inez is certainly battling against tremendous odds. She herself went through foster custody, and later told Terry, “I saw so much of myself [in you]....I just wanted to look out for you. I didn’t want you getting chewed up like I was. I seen somebody who needed me.”
She admits, however, that maybe her love was not pure: “But maybe I’m the one who needed you.” Earlier she had told Lucky, “Damaged people don’t know how to love each other.” And Lucky had admitted that he “never fully gave it [love] back” to Inez.
Loving is of vital importance, and both Inez and Lucky try hard to love, but as Inez realizes they are “damaged people”; and human as they are, they often err—in love, as in other aspects of their lives.
Besides battling to love Terry—and Lucky—Inez has a whole host of other problems to confront, and coming up through the foster-care system and with a limited education, plus a criminal record, she is not armed with the best tools to succeed. As she tells Terry, “Who heard me when I was hurt? It wasn’t you. And it damn sure wasn’t Lucky.”
Among her many challenges are getting back her custody of Terry, finding an apartment for them to live in, finding a job, getting Terry in the best schools possible and keeping him out of trouble, maintaining and remaining in an apartment (Terry says that he thinks the “landlord’s trying to push us out or something”), and dealing with Lucky, especially after he gets ill and is hospitalized. To make matters worse, Terry blames her for mistreating Lucky, even saying, “Maybe if you, if you weren’t so hard on him” he’d still be around.
Lucky and Terry also have their battles to fight. As Lucky admitted to Terry, he made some bad choices, feel into some bad traps. And as he told Inez, he didn’t love her as fully as he should have. Once married to Inez and a stepfather, he has to try to meet the challenges of fatherhood. Finally, he has to confront—as many of us have had to, or may have to in the future—serious illness and hospitalization.
Terry’s challenges are like those of many youth, plus the special ones facing a young Black in a poor neighborhood. (The ones Inez worried about—“police stops, getting in trouble with the law, getting shot,” etc.) More common to most youth were others like dealing with family life, finding a romantic interest, deciding where to go to college and what career to pursue.
When he’s 17, he tells Inez, the “only thing I ever wanted more than a mother was a fucking father.” He discovers a romantic interest in Simone, who works in a restaurant. She asks him what he’s interested in, and he tells her music, like the kind Quincy Jones produced for the film “Wiz.” After she says he should go to a school like Juilliard and she would help him apply, he replies , “No. Kids trying to get in there have been training for years.”
Regarding college, he’s told at his high school that his paperwork was denied, that the Social Security number he turned in wasn’t valid, that how he “ended up with phony papers” had to be sorted out, and that if he lied on his “college applications, it’s a felony.” (It turns out that shortly after surreptitiously taking custody of Terry at age 6, the newly-released-from-prison Inez obtained “phony papers” so that he could get in a school and proceed with his life.)
The absence of proper “paperwork” leads to other problems, but I’ll leave it to viewers to discover for themselves how the movie ends. To end this review, however, I’ll recall the words the poet Carl Sandburg once wrote, “Alike and ever alike we are on all continents in the need of love, food, clothing, work....From the tropics to arctics humanity lives with these needs so alike, so inexorably alike.” Thus, “A Thousand and One” is a film for film fans not just in the USA, but wherever there are families “fighting a hard battle.”
The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the Hollywood Progressive.
