Movie Review: Morris from America
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
Morris from America is about xenophobia and stereotypes, bullying, living as expatriates and mourning the death of a wife and mother, but mostly it is about the tenacity carried out with a striking tenderness by Curtis (Craig Robinson), a newly single dad taking care of his teenage boy, Morris (Markees Christmas) in Heidelberg, Germany, where they are, as he puts it to his son, “the only two brothers” here. For Morris this looks like, at his school and youth center, being treated with a partly fetishized fascination by one of his classmates, Katrin (Lina Keller) and with racial slurs by another, and being accused by the teacher of 
using marijuana before the other kids are considered. Curtis’s world in Germany is professional soccer coaching, the job that relocated them from the States. Curtis’s wife (an absolutely love-of-my-life type of love) has passed away, leaving him with lonely nights at home and often talking to the picture of his wife on the refrigerator and planting a kiss on it, and setting up Morris to feel even more alienated in their new environment. It struck me early on that Morris and Curtis share the same type of loneliness as they struggle in and navigate the process of adapting to life in Heidelberg.
Morris is not a character to sympathize with, and I mean that with the highest respect: He wouldn’t want you to feel bad for him, so the whole feeling-bad-for Morris thing would backfire. He is an incredibly sharp, self-aware and self-confident thirteen-year-old with a talent for freestyle rapping who could be a poster child for “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” Not that this is necessarily a good trait; the cruelest bullying comes from a boy who says Morris would do them all a favor by killing himself, striking at a deeper message the film introduces but does not explore. The expatriate life is challenging with its complexities of otherness, but director Chad Hartigan seems to suggest that bullying can target anyone perceived as different. Even if someone has a strong sense of self, they may not also have a positive reinforcement caretaker at home, as Morris does in Curtis, or a sisterly figure watching out for him/her, as Morris does in Inka (Carla Juri), his German tutor. The racism exposed in the film lives overtly in questions Morris gets from classmates such as isn’t he good at basketball and can’t black people dance well to a more nuanced chilling scene where Morris raises a plastic gun filled with water Katrin has given him in a prank, looks in the mirror at himself and shoots it. This scene cannot be seen without bringing to mind twelve-year-old Tamir Rice who was playing with a toy gun and shot by the police in 2014. Morris’s German, white classmates are able to exist in a way that Morris, as a black boy, cannot.
The film is astute in how it plays with time, by linking their intimate father-son experiences to larger events happening in the world about race and a synthesizing of them. In this way, Heidelberg does become what Curtis tells Morris it will mean for him later in life when he is a famous rapper – it is a place for him to collect experiences, grow stronger and develop his individuality. When they eat ice cream, Morris discovers a new flavor because the seller didn’t give him what he asked for. To get that flavor again, Curtis says simply, ask for the same flavor next time. This type of attitude means putting oneself in the present, in one’s living experience and using that as material to make the next moves. In the opening scene Curtis plays a rap song for Morris, and Morris seems to be enjoying the song until he says the beat is too slow. Although Curtis disagrees, he is the type of parental figure comfortable, even happy, with allowing space for his child to be himself and feel out his own artistic ears and preferences. Tough love comes in when Curtis discovers some of Morris’s rap lyrics involving misogyny and yells at Morris not to stop writing those lyrics because of their violence, per se, but implores him to write from what he knows now. Write what you know, what you are living, what is true for you, he tells his son; this is how you connect with people.
A gorgeous sequence happens when Morris visits a castle in Heidelberg, and the statutes and people around him begin moving along with his rap music, which plays through his earbuds most of the time. The film is provocative also about checking assumption and privilege when it comes to art, looking at what is considered fine or “cultured” art, such as museums or playing the flute, and their relationship to the lived art that is surviving through finding joy, friendship and music in the everyday, and contrasted finally to the musical arts Morris survives by and are what he lives for – what he lives to become more of. The friendship, and perhaps for Morris the first real crush, he and Katrin develop is significant because they end up helping each other see more clearly the world around them and the potentials each of them have to follow their dreams as the free, exploring spirits they are. Youth is not just an age, Morris’s teacher tells them early on, it is a state of being. When Morris and Katrin are out dancing one night, Inka happens to also be there. She tells him to take his time being young, that being old will come. “Nobody dances like you, Morris,” she says.
Dina Paulson-McEwen
Latest posts by Dina Paulson-McEwen (see all)
- Interview with Hannes Holm, writer/director of A Man Called Ove - April 15, 2017
- Unknown Pleasures and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Junun in Berlin - July 3, 2016
- 10 Best Things About the 2016 Oscars - March 1, 2016
