Selah and the Spades
Directed by: Tayarisha Poe
Written by: Tayarisha Poe
Starring: Lovie Simone, Celeste O'Connor, Jharrel Jerome, Ana Mulvoy Ten, Jesse Williams, Neckhebet Kum Juch
Drama - 97 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 16 Apr 2020
Written by: Tayarisha Poe
Starring: Lovie Simone, Celeste O'Connor, Jharrel Jerome, Ana Mulvoy Ten, Jesse Williams, Neckhebet Kum Juch
Drama - 97 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 16 Apr 2020
There is a peculiar slice of the high school graduate pie who worry about legacy. Most of us looked toward the future, more than happy to put SATs and cliques in our rearview mirrors for the more accepting cultures of undergraduate education. Those legacy types, however, agonize over how the next classes and evolving culture will remember them. The eponymous Selah frets at the idea of graduation and perceives college as a death knell to her power and status. Her psyche floats on the notion nobody could possibly carry forth what she has set in place and they will never understand what an amazing person she is. Selah and the Spades teases a juicy tale of high school factions and boarding school realpolitik, but it sheds its sharp edge offering forced high school melodrama we can find from any number of YA faucets.
Writer/director Tayarisha Poe hints at a quick-witted screenplay with the introduction of the Haldwell School’s five factions. Everyone has a noir nickname and an assigned role in keeping the bourgeois student body stuffed full of paid for essays, pills, booze, parties, and most importantly, safe from any administrative attention. If Poe aimed for satire, these kids would be a prequel to a Congressional legislative session 30 years on. Our collective disappointment appears after the screenplay immediately forgets there are five factions, shunting the other four to the background, and focusing on Selah (Lovie Simone), the leader of the Spades faction, and her calculated and sometimes felonious behavior to maintain power amongst the powerful.
Writer/director Tayarisha Poe hints at a quick-witted screenplay with the introduction of the Haldwell School’s five factions. Everyone has a noir nickname and an assigned role in keeping the bourgeois student body stuffed full of paid for essays, pills, booze, parties, and most importantly, safe from any administrative attention. If Poe aimed for satire, these kids would be a prequel to a Congressional legislative session 30 years on. Our collective disappointment appears after the screenplay immediately forgets there are five factions, shunting the other four to the background, and focusing on Selah (Lovie Simone), the leader of the Spades faction, and her calculated and sometimes felonious behavior to maintain power amongst the powerful.
However, this is high school power we’re talking about. After caps are thrown in the air and yearbooks are signed, Selah’s power is defunct. She joins a long line of other protagonists who know school is where they belong: Pauly Shore in Son-in-Law, Chris Farley in Tommy Boy, Ryan Reynolds in Van Wilder, and Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore. But, those are comedies. It should be funny for someone to cling to what is supposed to be temporary. Selah’s situation is not even wry comedy, she deals with more of a morose pathos. Behind in naming a successor to lead Haldwell’s booze and drug trade and doing her best to dodge mention of a previous acolyte gone astray, Selah zeroes in on Freshman Paloma (Celeste O’Connor), a journalism nerd with a shrewd photographic eye.
Selah imposes herself as Paloma’s mentor. She spouts a catchy, but highly practiced, soliloquy about the entire world telling 17 year-old girls what to do with their bodies. This diatribe is designed to impress the impressionable and Paloma takes the bait. Yet, there is a disconnect. Selah can dish the verbal Catch-22 of high school girls and appears to even believe it as she displays an inner fire to resist definition by outside forces, be it her mother, peers, and the school administration. But none of this “fight the power” attitude manifests itself in the script or Selah’s dealings with her classmates. The slightest innuendos lead to cataclysmic eruptions and Selah would rather roll around in the mud talking about respect and the zero sum game of faction domination rather than address any of that so-called societal oppression she was so fierce about earlier.
Paloma is not as cold-blooded as Selah. She hints at an alternative vision for the Spades once Selah moves on, a future Selah does not endorse and prompts her to move even farther away from any empathy we had for her to start with. The script collapses into an incomprehensible mess as we all forget which clique does what because they’re off screen for so long and exploring power dynamics between the narcotics clique and the party clique is not as intriguing as the Corleones versus Barzanis. Poe based Haldwell on her own boarding school experiences, an insular society removed from the real world with its own rules. By the end, I was thankful I was safe in my public school education rather than navigating a school full of these preppy poseurs. Poe’s characters are deep enough to carry an intriguing film about boarding school badasses, but her insistence on following Selah’s rollercoaster machinations is off-putting and even more criminal than all of illegal narcotics spilling out of Selah’s stockpile, it’s boring.
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