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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Gangsta meets wigga in James Toback's brutal, hip-hop-driven look at modern-day race relations.
Apr 5, 2000 | In his new film, "Black and White," James Toback has gotten hold of a great subject: the infatuation privileged white kids have with hip-hop. In an early classroom scene, a young black girl talks about how all the white kids she knows romanticize the ghetto life they've heard about in hip-hop songs, while all her black friends are doing what they can to get out of the inner city. The elevation of street life to the most glamorous and up-to-date adolescent fantasy has the sting of a nasty joke. If the bleakness and crime of black inner-city life seem insurmountable, what better vengeance is there than to make that life seem desirable and then rake in the profits from the white kids who are ready to embrace hip-hop as an authentic, gritty side of life that their own sheltered existence has protected them from? Hip-hop, in the movie's view, is a way of playing the hand you're dealt as a form of revenge.
But Toback is much more a fantasist than a sociologist. The kick of some of his previous films, particularly "Exposed," came from the intersection of his fantasy worlds, the heated-up meeting of high fashion, high culture and pulp lowlife. Had he let his fantasies run wild and conceived of "Black and White" as a (no pun intended) dark comedy on the combustibility of race relations and pop culture's tapeworm ability to infect anything with glamour, the movie might have been satirically explosive.
Toback's provocateur instinct is periodically at work in "Black and White," particularly in the first scene, where two white girls have a threesome with a black gangster in a secluded part of Central Park. (When a couple of little kids come upon the copulating trio, the hood's henchman points a gun at the kids to scare them off.) But for the most part Toback approaches his movie as sociological investigator, a role for which he has neither the temperament nor the discipline. The cast is filled with the totems of his cherished fantasy worlds: beautiful young people (particularly young women), pop music (members of the Wu-Tang Clan play various roles), fashion (in the person of Claudia Schiffer), sports (Allan Houston of the New York Knicks in a key role) and particularly his White Negro reveries of black virility and power. Mike Tyson, playing himself with his odd, light little voice, is the movie's unforgiving black sage, the same function that great football player Jim Brown filled in Toback's first film, 1978's "Fingers"; it gives some indication of how far-out Toback's fantasy life is that a convicted rapist is presented as a fount of hard wisdom.
The joke of "Black and White" is the shifting social barriers that allow these worlds to interact. It's a good joke. (It was reported that at the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Rock Style" exhibit this winter, Henry Kissinger, after being introduced to Sean "Puffy" Combs, asked someone, "Vy does he call himself 'Fluffy'?") The impact of the movie is meant to come from the moments when the representatives of the various groups feel their existence threatened and circle the wagons, making those barriers suddenly impenetrable. Unfortunately, the movie has the fatal feel of those films in which the director seems more interested in throwing a party than in directing, bringing all his interesting friends together for the sheer audacity of having them in the same room. Method Man, meet Marla Maples.
Some of the cast members rise above the mess. As one of the wigga wannabes, Bijou Phillips' antsy demeanor and nasal, Betty Boop voice are dead-on hilarious. She's the marriage of white privilege and black affect; you can't help laughing at the sight of this hot-to-trot peroxided pixie ending a call to her boyfriend with "I'm'a call you. Aw-ight?" She's like an amphetamine version of the blank and calculating young things who peopled Jean-Luc Godard's '60s movies. Brooke Shields, as a documentary filmmaker hanging out with Phillips and her gang, and Robert Downey Jr., as her gay husband, are a remarkable comedy team. Shields, who in the old days was nearly always a wooden presence, is game and canny as an opportunistic scene maker donning the role of cultural anthropologist. And Downey, who doesn't even try to be subtle, swans about outrageously. They have the movie's funniest sequence. Encountering Tyson at a party, Downey, practically swooning from the "Pleasure me, Mandingo" fantasies racing through his head, comes on to him. Tyson responds by trying to strangle him. Shields provides the perfect capper. After calming things down and getting her husband safely out of Tyson's clutches, she can't resist coming on to him, either.
Toback's love of improvisational immediacy is apparent in about half of the scenes. But where his last (and best) film, "Two Girls and a Guy," gave us the fruits of improvisation, "Black and White" is content with the pips. There's some of John Cassavetes' unmediated pushing for "truth" in "Black and White," that phony aesthetic that holds that shaping a scene is tantamount to falsifying it. That approach is tantamount to boring the audience, and even with the spiky potency of its subject, "Black and White" is Toback's slackest piece of direction. The formlessness in the improvised scenes is even more glaring in contrast to the scripted ones, most of which are painfully artificial.
