_Higher Learning_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs John Singleton's new movie is ambitious and contentious. It's also overstated and melodramatic, its characters are clearly stereotypical and occasionally awkward, its plot turns sometimes predictable or preposterous. Yet, as we know too well in this Year of Gump, reductionist tactics can be effective and even energizing, and Singleton is a less cynical filmmaker than Oscar-winner Robert Zemeckis. _Higher Learning_ is exceptionally effective: it makes direct emotional and moral connections with its viewers, in part by making some assumptions about their experiences and expectations, understanding them as necessarily informed, politicized, and frustrated. And it doesn't condescend; rather, it complicates its cliches so that responses are far from uniform, ranging from aggressive to contemplative, supportive to oppositional. Such conflicts result less from the film's platitudes (racism is ignorance) and easy targets (cops are creeps) - though these do evoke loud vocal reactions - than from its pushing such banalities to places they don't usually go, such that its viewers are also pushed to "unlearn'' (the film's closing word) what they think they know. And this directive can feel urgent, pressed up against us with vivid camerawork (close-ups and skewed angles), suggestive images (Rodney King's beating is an inescapable visual reference), and trenchant musical tracks (from Liz Phair to Rage Against the Machine to Me'shell NdegeOcello). The film begins by dissing traditional values and images. The opening shot pans from a screenful of the U.S. flag to a statue of Christopher Columbus. It's the first day on a campus named, with raging irony, Columbus University. Then we see a series of characters, each identified by well-known codes. Alienated white boy Remy (Michael Rappaport) tacks a Danzig poster to his dorm room wall, naive Orange County native Kristen (Kristy Swanson) puts up family photos, and athlete-on-a-scholarship Malik (Omar Epps) plays rap. These types, locked and loaded, for the most part continue along their unsurprising tracks: Kristen has fluffy-haired girlfriends, Malik learns that running is a metaphor for his general powerlessness, and constantly rejected Remy starts to resent everything and everyone. Their stories are separate but, according to formula, headed toward a climactic intersection, a finale helped along by encounters with authority figures (who serve as signposts for correct, or at least conformist, action). These most compelling of these possibilities are embodied by a Caribbean political science professor, Phipps (Laurence Fishburne, referring to and extending his _Boyz N the Hood_ role, as voice of reason and resistance, explaining the economic exploitation that grounds democracy), and Fudge, a sixth-year senior whose charismatic clout is based in the fact that he's played by Ice Cube. While Phipps articulates a set of rational, longview options, Fudge's responses to daily oppressions are immediate and crowd-pleasing. They even, sometimes, display some unusual ways to build alliances. These alliances are (potentially) the points where the film pushes hardest against predictable outcomes. When Kristen gets drunk and date-raped at a frat party, she stumbles home, where her roommate Monet (Regina King) takes the assailant's anxious phone call. He's bound and determined to be a villain, though, and proceeds to call her a "black bitch,'' whereupon she enslists the help of Fudge and his crew. Granted, Kristen's rape doesn't even get mentioned when the two sets of guys face each other down over the question of what you can call black women. Still, it is an atypical image of a group of variously oppressed characters fighting against ignorance that as it turns out, becomes the film's political point of departure: united fronts against the stereotypes. The scene that repeatedly - at least during the several screenings I attended - elicits the loudest crowd reaction is probably the film's riskiest, politically. Motivated after the rape, Kristen joins a feminist group on campus, and finds herself attracted to its lesbian leader, Taryn (Jennifer Connelly) at the same time that she's approached by a nice guy (they do exist), Wayne (Jason Wyles, the "other guy'' in Bon Jovi's video for "Always''). In one love scene, the camera pans between her and each partner. As she kissed Taryn, the very vocal audience was divided between loud dissenters and earnest shushers. Yes, the rape-victim- turning-lesbian trajectory is less than original. But the film, which does reduce some points with incendiary sermonizing, doesn't go simple here; it doesn't make a choice for Kristen, but leaves possibilities open. That it even begins to go there, however awkwardly and tentatively, bravely challenges at least some viewers' expectations. Still, the central expectation of this film, that it will show some serious clashing between black and white characters, is delivered with resounding lack of subtlety. Remy's shift from slack-jawed geek to gun-toting neo-nazi is rushed (and really, his run-in with Malik is too convenient), and Malik's transition from political innocent to leaves little doubt about his proper course (and while it's emotionally potent, its also extremely tired that his revelation occurs because of a danger to his wise and sensual girlfriend Deja [Tyra Banks]). Fudge undergoes no transformations: he _is_ Ice Cube, an emblem of articulate, well- read activism (he turns Malik on to Frederick Douglass). His repeated confrontations with stereotyped cops (who read blackness as by-definition threatening) inspire everyone's sympathy and support (the cops ask for his ID and he asks for theirs: it's a small but provocative moment that gets an appreciative rise from viewers). Plus, he even takes some minor dissing from Monet with grace (this is a shift from his character in, say, _Boyz_, who couldn't imagine women getting equal time). What's most interesting here is something that the film doesn't develop, even though it's plainly a central subtext. Fudge has a counterpart in the soft-spoken skinhead leader. Both are caught up by forces larger than themselves; both attempt to think through their situations, using force only as a last resort (this until the end, when the skinheads go all out for "white power''). Fudge is the more righteously outraged, of course, and he's also shrewd, quite aware that beating the skinheads in a scuffle is no great victory: as he points out to his all- excited friends (who reenact the fight with sound effects), nothing's changed, property and power still belong to the establishment. This point is made as well by Deja, though no one listens to her; and is alluded to by repeated shots of the stifling school architecture, including "founding fathers'' portraits and that flag. Moreover, it's the point with which the skinheads are obsessed, controlling and owning. This is the order that needs to be unlearned. Young people who already know that Columbus' "new world'' was a colonialist hoax, have a headstart on this radical unlearning. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film/media studies and is coordinator of the queer studies project at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.