Funny Movie Where White Guy Grows Up in a Black Home
"Black or White," a domestic drama almost a custody battle over a mixed-race kid, is the kind of movie you root for, because it's clearly coming from a sincere and honest place. But it's oft painful, and not in a adept way; information technology's painful because of the roads it doesn't explore, the shortcuts information technology takes, and the special pleading it can't cease itself from indulging in.
Written and directed by Mike Folder, and bankrolled by star Kevin Costner, it wants to illuminate and heal through straight talk, and if y'all look at it purely as a commercial venture, there's no denying its specialness. There are no superheroes, no robots, no dinosaurs, no guns, zilch that producers would consider exploitable elements. There's no easy market place slot into which information technology tin exist placed and nurtured. Information technology's what used to exist called, in the 1950s and '60s, a "trouble movie." In this case the trouble is racial distrust, and how it's perpetuated in a country that likes to think of itself as post-racial, and that's filled with people who think they're not racist, not at all, no sir, no ma'am.
Unfortunately, "Black or White" is itself part of another sort of problem: the tendency to middle what ought to be an extended family's drama on the distress of a White human—in this case, Costner's character, Elliott Anderson, a recently widowed and visible wealthy grandfather. Elliott wishes people would recognize how hard he's trying and how good his eye is, and just go out him alone in his big business firm with its large swimming pool and his Mexican maid to raise his young granddaughter Eloise (Jillian Estell). The poor girl's White female parent died in childbirth, and barely knew her African-American father, Reggie (Andre Holland of the fantabulous Cinemax serial "The Knick"), a drug addict who got Eloise'due south mother meaning and has barely been heard from since.
The film starts strong in a hospital waiting room, dropping you right into the worst moment of Elliott's life: learning that his wife (Jennifer Ehle) died of injuries sustained in a car wreck. The motion-picture show'southward sincerity is instantly credible, along with its sense of empathy. The movie has a lot of problems, which nosotros'll deal with momentarily, simply for a while, at least, deck-stacking isn't one of them. Elliott is no plaster saint. He's a Infant boomer who probably considered himself race-blind until his daughter started sleeping with Reggie and ended up bearing his child. But he ways well, and his actions prove it. He speedily assumes child-raising duties once performed by his wife, including combing Eloise's hair and tying it with a bow (his grade is lacking, to put information technology mildly), and even hires a tutor, Duvan Araga (Mpho Koaho of TNT'due south "Falling Skies"), to assist the girl with math homework that he can't brand heads or tails of.
Then Eloise's grandmother Rowena Jeffers (Octavia Spencer) enters the motion-picture show and agitates for custody of Eloise. She'southward a pillar of the community who lives in a minor but comfortable house in South Fundamental L.A. and owns two other homes and six businesses. He motivations in the custody fight, like Elliott's, are complex and conflicted: self-serving in some ways, quite reasonable in others. She wants Eloise to explore the other side of her heritage by spending time with her African-American relatives. She wants the girl to grow up surrounded by loved ones who can support her during a flow of grieving, rather than living in near-isolation in a big, bland house with grandpa and his maid. And she wants to keep Eloise rubber past giving her a haven from Elliott's drinking, which has grown so astringent in the aftermath of his wife's decease that he pays Duvan to drive Eloise to school while he sits in the passenger seat, muttering and reeking of alcohol.
Folder, who oversaw 1 of Costner'southward best performances in "The Upside of Anger," based this story on what happened to his nephew, a biracial child whose dad was out of the movie and whose mom died at 33. There are scenes in which seeming voices of reason say and do petty, cocky-destructive or outright stupid things, and scenes in which irritating or fundamentally untrustworthy characters blurt out something that's undeniably true.The performances range from solid to excellent. First among equals is Costner, who's fearless about letting Elliott be hurtful, maudlin and pathetic at times. Spencer puts beyond Rowena's common sense and bulldozer righteousness besides as an impulsive, self-defeating busybody quality that alarms her own adult kids; their ranks include her son Jeremiah (Anthony Mackie), a lawyer who warns Rowena that the only way to win custody is to pigment Elliott equally a racist, a charge that's probably true in certain ways but that will need to be puffed up to monstrous dimensions in court.
Merely besides often the actors seem to struggle with dialogue and situations that turn their characters into clownish adversaries and stick-figure obstacles. Mackie'due south lawyer is one prey: he'south at that place mainly to inflame tensions and push Rowena to green-light extreme and ultimately counterproductive tactics. Another is Holland, who deserves amedal for making an increasingly repellent andnonsensical character watchable. To its credit, "Black or White" keepsinsisting that we sympathize with Reggie'southward struggle to stay clean, and sympathise that he's been placed in animpossible position: Rowena'southward side of the family has a meliorate shot at custody if he can prove he'due south cutting out to be a father, just you demand simply look into his haunted, guilty eyes to see that he'due south not.
Unfortunately, Reggie ends up validating White stereotypes of absentee Blackness fathers who would rather smoke crack than enhance their kids; he'southward a hapless version of the sort of bogeyman that might have made its mode into a 1980s Land of the Union accostmost the failures of liberalism. The picture never subverts the stereotype, even in its more laudable moments, such as a nifty chip of crosscutting that reminds us that Reggie'south drug habit and Elliott's drinking are both well-nigh numbing unbearable pain.
In the terminate, "Black or White" is too disorganized and pokey, and too comfy with sitcom-like clowning, to truly illuminate or heal . Too many scenes verge on sitcom broadness, and even the more than delightfully original supporting players (including Duvan, who speaksseveral languages fluently and has written thesis papers on everyconceivable subject) wear out their welcomes. Worse still is the manner that "Blackness or White" keepsthe focus on Elliott rather than distributing its screen fourth dimension more democratically, a strategy that might take countered complaints that the motion-picture show is mainly concerned with proving that Elliott is not a racist, and that past extension, White viewers whoplace with Elliott aren't racists, either.
The picture show uses the n-discussion in a couple of pivotal scenes, and not casually either, but it's impossible tocongratulate the film for daring to go there when Elliott gets the chance to explicate himself and launches into what sounds like the sort of half-apology, half-excuse that a White movie star might make later on existence defenseless using bigoted language in public. Hisexclamation that well-nigh people have racist thoughts from time to time, just what matters isn't our first thought but our second and 3rd, rings true. But putting information technology in the oral fissure of a rich White man is nonetheless a baffling strategic mistake—though not nearly equally ill-advised as establishing Reggie'southward weak claim on custody by revealing that he doesn't know how to spell his daughter's proper name. And the melodramatic climax, which momentarily endorses Elliott's ugliest fears, is such a tawdry betrayal of the movie'south nobler impulses that "Black or White" never recovers from it.
This movie is the kind of failure that makes you frustrated and deplorable rather than angry. Its heart is in the right place, simply its listen is dislocated.
Matt Zoller Seitz
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Big of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.
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Black or White (2015)
121 minutes
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Source: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/black-or-white-2015
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