A Quarter Century On Hype Williams' Belly Remains a Visual Masterpiece and a Goddamned Mess In Every Other Way
It's hard to overstate how huge Hype Williams was at the height of his Clinton-era superstardom. Williams wasn’t just a Hip-Hop music video director; he was the Hip-Hop music video director.
In the 1990s, Williams was the biggest and the best. His clients read like a who’s who of Hip Hop and R&B: Wu-Tang Clan, Mary J. Blige, Usher, The Notorious B.I.G, LL Cool J, Boyz II Men, Outkast, 2Pac, Dr. Dre, R. Kelly, Nas, Lauryn Hill, A Tribe Called Quest, Jay-Z, Will Smith, Scarface, DMX, Nas, TLC, Method Man, Ma$e and Snoop Dogg. And that’s just the 1990s!
But Williams’ most important collaborators were Missy Elliott and Busta Rhymes. Williams’ muses in his God-like prime were human cartoon characters willing to do anything that it took to make a dazzling, unforgettable video, even if that meant dressing in a trash bag suit that makes them look like a Hip Hop Michelin Man.
In his prime, Williams was the gold standard, the man you wanted to see when you had the resources and money to do whatever you wanted. The music video maestro's pioneering music videos played a huge role in crafting the iconography of 1990s hip-hop.
Williams was to Hip-Hop flash what Michel Gondry was to Gallic quirk, and Spike Jonze was to prankish postmodernism.
But where Gondry and Jonze made a smooth and impressive move to feature films with instant classics like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Her, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Be Kind Rewind, Williams struggled.
Williams was at various points slated to direct film adaptations of Fat Albert and Speed Racer, but he’s only written and directed one movie, 1998’s Belly. The shoot was a nightmare that went over schedule and over budget due to its auteur’s expensive combination of ambition and inexperience.
The hotshot music director was learning on the job, and while Belly evolved inevitably into a major cult film, its troubled shooting and anemic box-office total undoubtedly played a role in Williams’s spending the last quarter century in movie director jail.
Nobody films black skin like Williams. He’s fascinated with texture, filters, and shades, making everything look simultaneously hyper-vivid and surreal. He creates images that make you want to reach out and touch them because they seem so tactile and real.
Williams brings that peerless visual sense to Belly, particularly to a bravura early set-piece heist set to Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life,” where the robbers’ eyes glow an ungodly green light, like blacklight thugs from outer space.
The music video director brings a musical sense of rhythm to the scene and the ones that follow. Hype Williams is yet another in-demand music video who made the big leap to feature films while retaining his MTV soul.
Nas, who has a story credit along with Williams and actor Anthony Bodden, and DMX star as Sincere and Tommy "Buns/Bundy" Brown, respectively. They’re childhood friends and longtime criminal associates, as well as partners in robbery and murder.
Belly applied cutting-edge, state-of-the-art visuals to a story redolent of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Casino and Warner Brothers crime melodramas from the 1930s.
Sincere and Tommy have antithetical attitudes towards guns and crime. Sincere, being a man of conscience who spends much of his time contemplating lofty matters, thinks that guns and crimes are bad and indulges in them reluctantly.
Tommy, on the other hand, is a violent wild card. If this is a Hip Hop Goodfealls, then he’s Joe Pesci to Nas’ Ray Liotta. When Tommy is afforded an opportunity to sell super-heroin (which is like regular heroin but more heroiny), he leaps at the chance, while Sincere is more ambivalent because he senses, on some level, that heroin is bad and that people shouldn’t sell it.
They’re dispatched to a small town in the South where they attract the attention of jealous snitch Big Head Rico (Tyrin Turner, in a scene-stealing performance) and nefarious player Shameek, aka Father Sha (Method Man).
Nas may be the lead, but Williams seems to have realized that the charisma and magnetism the rapper conveys through music does not translate to the big screen. Nas is a low-key, sleepy presence easily upstaged by pretty much everyone else, but particularly Turner, DMX, and Method Man.
There’s a reason that Belly marked the beginning of DMX’s career as a name-above-the-title movie star and the end of Nas’ brief time as a cinematic lead.
In the third act, our heroes are faced with stark moral choices. Sincere is moved to leave the street life, with its rampant criminality, and move to Africa for the sake of his soul and his spirit.
Tommy, meanwhile, is ordered by a drug kingpin to go undercover with a Nation of Islam-style organization so that he can assassinate its Louis Farrakhan-like leader. Yet he can’t help but be moved by the religion’s ideas.
In its shockingly talky climax, Williams pulls a Tyler Perry and has a preacher deliver the film’s message via a lengthy monologue.
But where Perry invariably took audiences to church for education and moral edification, Williams has real-life civial rights activist Dr. Ben Chavis deliver the following monologue as a Nation of Islam leader Tommy is sent to kill: "I knew you were coming... so I sent everyone away... because I believed my final moment was at hand. Before you pull that trigger... and take my life, I would like the chance to tell you some things, perhaps to think about after I am gone. Don't worry about me stallin'. My people have orders to leave me to my studies for another 15 minutes. I will only take five. Can you bear with me? Will you? Then make up your mind. Today marks the change of not only a New Year, but a new millennium. Take a look around. The majority of the youth roam the streets... dealing in drugs, sex and violence, thinking these things have no real effect on life. Crimes without real punishment. An uncaring, unfeeling generation... without knowledge of self. This is the future of our nation, the future of our people. Do you think hatred and evil will go unpunished? The world is now feeling the heat... from flames it has kept burning since the beginning of civilization. You represent that fire. You and I are just a small part of God's plan. The evil men of this world have applied every method possible... to deceive its occupants. And each time with greater success than anticipated. But no more. Tonight, with this new millennium, God will begin to overcome this evil. I represent the truth... to the people. Without truth, nothing is sacred. The lie-that's what the devil is all about. You know that, that's why you're here. The truth is, we all play a grave role... in our own destruction. Your money. Your lifestyles. The things that people value and covet so dearly... are the bait that lures them out of the light. Through the love of others... I have power. The truth gives me this. Those that fear me send you here, here to murder all that I say. They use what you fear against you. Your fear of death, your fear of imprisonment. Where in this world is anyone safe from death? You see the lies you've been told? The path you take is not your own. Have you ever thought about how precious a life is? How difficult it is to create? How loosely and easily it has been for you to take away? Brother, help me. Help me to do what's right. Help me to stop the slaughter of our children. Help me to put an end to the disrespect... and the dishonor of our most valuable resource: the black woman. Help me put an end... to the destruction of the young mind through the use of drugs, alcohol. Help me to build up a population of great thinkers. People who create change... through thoughtfulness and spirituality. Will you choose that truth? Will you? Will you choose the light over the darkness? Hold it, stay where you are. Will you choose life? It's time. It's time, man. It's time.”
If your response to that massive block of text is “I'm not reading all that, but I’m happy for you or sorry that happened,” the Cliff’s Notes version is that the film boldly opposes evil, darkness, murder, and crime and advocates goodness, light, compassion, caring, and empathy.
Gangsta rap is a largely nihilistic genre but Belly is ultimately a moralistic endeavor as interested in preaching as it is in entertaining.
Belly works better as a Hip-Hop fable about choosing light over dark than as a movie about flesh-and-blood human beings.
Re-watching it for this column reminded me of a Hard Times article with the headline, "Generation-Defining Rap Song Followed on Album by Least Funny Skit Ever Recorded.”
Visually, Belly is a masterpiece as bold and audacious as the day it was released. From a writing, acting, and plot standpoint, however, it is a goddamn mess.
Belly is worth seeing for its music and the images alone. It’s aged in an interesting way that makes me hope that Williams gets a chance to direct another movie because while Belly is far from a complete success he directed the hell out of it and a man with his gift for crafting images deserves t a second chance to work on his magic on a big rather than small screen.
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