Thoughts on Will

    On Criterion last week, I watched Will, a 1981 drama directed by Jessie Maple. It was the first independent feature film to be directed by a Black woman. The film centers on themes of addiction and recovery, focusing on Will (Obaka Adedunyo, in his first film role), a man in Harlem who is recovering from a heroin addiction and has been sober for two years, who lives with his wife Jean (Loretta Devine, also in her first film role). He meets a 13-year old boy nicknamed "Little Brother" (Robert Dean), who he can tell is being influenced by the same cycles of drugs and addiction in their neighborhood that pulled him in, and he befriends Little Brother, inviting him to live with him and his wife to be a positive role model and to keep him away from the temptations of drugs.

    Will had been a star basketball player in his youth, and he becomes a coach for a high school girls' basketball team, helping the team get better and score well in games. Getting back into coaching basketball is a great way for him to get past his addiction and heal more in recovery. 

    But Little Brother is still curious about drugs, even snorting some cocaine he finds, and Will yells at him and is angry because he doesn't want him to go down the same path he did. It doesn't help that the neighborhood boys are mocking Little Brother for not wanting to do drugs and are pressuring him into it.

    This was a decent movie. I felt it got better when the actors were more natural with each other, like in scenes where Will and Little Brother are roughhousing with each other, or when Will and Jean are being flirtatious and teasing one another. When it got more into plot-dependent dialogue scenes, it felt more stilted, and had the feeling of an after-school TV special about the dangers of drugs. 

    I liked the film more for watching scenes of early 1980s Harlem, with documentarian filmmaking; seeing Loretta Devine in an early role (she would star in Dreamgirls on Broadway around the same time, her star-making role); and comparing it to later films like 2006's Half Nelson (where Ryan Gosling played a schoolteacher in recovery trying to mentor Shareeka Epps' high school student) and 2016's Moonlight (where Mahershala Ali plays a drug dealer trying to protect a young gay boy from his abusive home even if he knows he is complicit in selling drugs to his mother).

    Will won an award at the Athens International Film Festival and was used as an educational film in New York drug rehab centers. In 2024, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for its cultural significance. 

    Jessie Maple, the director, who passed away in 2023 at age 86, initially studied medical technology, but switched to become a filmmaker through training in Ossie Davis' Third World Cinema, and through a program run by WNET public television in NYC. She worked hard, through a lot of discrimination and legal action, to be the first Black woman admitted to the New York camera operators union in the 1970s, and used her perspective to make sure that Black voices were heard in news stories and not cut out. She made Will in 1981, and the basketball drama Twice as Nice in 1989, and screened her own films and other films by Black directors in her Harlem brownstone under the name 20 West Theater, Home of Black Cinema. The Black Film Center & Archive at Indiana University holds her papers and films in the Jessie Maple collection.