Be Kind, Rewind: A Review

Be Kind, Rewind has a quirky concept that I expect will leave some cold, but I found worth a chuckle. Mos Def stars as Mike, an employee of an aging video rental store owned by Danny Glover’s Elroy Fletcher. It’s an aging store, hanging onto VHS against the DVD revolution, in an aging section of a decrepit New Jersey town, fighting to hang onto its life in the face of “urban renewal.” Trying to figure out how to keep the business going, Fletcher heads out of town and leaves the business in Mike’s hands. Struggling to prove himself, Mike tries to keep it all together, including trying to enforce the one clear rule: “Keep Jerry Out.”

Jerry, played by Jack Black, is Mike’s odd friend with lots of odd notions. Quickly after Fletcher takes off, Jerry gets the idea for he and Mike to sabotage the nearby electric power plant, trying to get them back for causing his headaches. After Mike bails, Jerry somehow is able to get himself magnetized, something that they slowly discover over the next few days as complaining customers bring Mike to realize that his friend has inadvertently demagnetized every single one of his tapes.

Panicked at the destruction of the business, Mike and Jerry concoct their grand act of desperation (and the grand suspension of disbelief for the film) to save the business: instead of buying new tapes, they pull out a camcorder and decide to film their own versions of the films. The film takes the most time with their filming of Ghostbuster’s, which was pretty hilarious. Everything is done uber-cheap and uber-fast, making for a great recreation of this and other films. They’re dependent on their memory of these films, which is sometimes less than perfect, adding greatly to the comedy.

The second act of the film shows their budding success. The real comedy is not that they pull off these films, but that increasingly people find out about their work and demand more. They become local celebrities, and their efforts, now dubbed “Sweding,” morphs to involve incorporating the customers into the films.

Running underneath the comedy are some fascinating social commentaries. The film is itself a celebration of film and its ability to bring people together in community. Despite the individual nature of watching a film at a theater, the film delights in showing the ways in which popular film becomes the lingua franca of a community. One discussion about The Lion King engages strangers who are decades apart, but share in their delight in particular aspects of the film.

The “Sweding” process reflects on our desire to be participants in the elements of our pop culture. While film unites, it also isolates, as it can keep us from creatively participating in our culture. This process reminds us of our own desire to participate. Whether it’s the internet boon and its interaction with the celebrity culture, the You Tube generation, or the rise of “fandom” for all aspects of pop culture, the entertainment industry itself is acutely aware of the power of encouraging this kind of participation, and the film seems to understand the power that participation brings.

Still, the film takes a significant plot turn as the studios find about Mike and Jerry’s creative efforts. Showing up with injunctions and damage awards, Mike and Jerry are quickly faced with the challenge of saving the business again, as well as saving the community itself. Without walking too much into the third act, they decide to make their own film, this one focusing on their own town’s history. As much as “Sweding” has brought their town together, so will their film unite people around their own community.

It is here that Be Kind, Rewind offers the most intriguing commentary, and one that I think extends far beyond the films boundaries. As they pour themselves into their town history, they encounter the reality that legends have built up that just aren’t historical. Rather than seeking to find the truth, or to describe legend as legend, they, and the participants in the story, just decide to make up their town’s history as they go along. Truth takes a backseat to this celebration of community.

It is a fascinating example of a postmodern treatment of history. Community is celebrated, and the experience of telling history, even fabricated history, is unifying and thus good. Within the context of the film, it works. We’re rooting for these people and their struggling town, and aren’t too worried about the veracity of their story. We just want them to find some pride in their town and enjoy the experience of working together for a better community.

Even as their story comes together, though, I could only wonder about the places in life where this kind of story would ultimately be destructive. Within the contemporary American church, there are a number of voices who offer a version of the church’s history that show about as much fabrication or simplistic misinterpretation as Be Kind’s storytellers. There is a spirit among many that echoes the film’s values and shows less concern about the veracity of our telling of history than of the emotive power that our telling has for our present community. We don’t care about whether the story is true, only that the story has emotional power for us.

It is in this place that Be Kind offers an interesting caution. For a community trying to save itself from dreadful poverty, I expect there’s not much harm in a little homegrown story about a community legend that isn’t grounded much in fact. But the story of the church is rooted in the Story itself, and the Story’s only meaning is found in the historical reality that it actually happened. The testimony of the Christian church is that it finds its strength when it tells its story well, and that includes that it tells the story how it really happened.

The ultimate value of Be Kind, Rewind is in elevating community over truth. The church has the same temptation today, but the testimony of the past, indeed the testimony of Scripture, is that those two values aren’t in opposition to each other, and in fact depend on each other for their real meaning.