Saturday, Jul 19, 2008
Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding Jr. remember a time when men were men, girls were cute and pencil-necked Poindexters stayed out of your damn face.
Nov 10, 2000 | Interracial-buddy flicks have been around at least since "Brian's Song," the TV film about cancer-stricken halfback Brian Piccolo that made every boy in my fifth-grade class weep without shame. In latter-day Hollywood, these movies are back, and while they've gotten more sophisticated in some ways, they haven't necessarily gotten any better. "When the dying Piccolo (James Caan) was leaving his pal Gale Sayers (Billy Dee Williams) alone in the Bears' backfield, or Bill Cosby and Robert Culp were bagging bad guys on TV's "I Spy," we believed that manly friendships between manly men could overcome America's painful racial history.
These days, according to movies like "Remember the Titans" and now "Men of Honor," we believe, well, pretty much the same thing. Except we now see that it won't be easy, fellas, and that the manly men in question may hate each other, at least until they can find some four-eyed pansy-boy bureaucrat they hate more. In other words, many cans of whoop-ass will need opening between here and the land of racial harmony. Forget activism and the March on Washington and civil rights laws and the rest of that limp-wristed professor stuff. America will be healed by a little old-fashioned male pain and suffering, by linemen and Navy roughnecks and other guys who look like members of the Village People beating the living crap out of one another.
OK, I exaggerate, but only a little. "Men of Honor" means to be an inspirational tale, loosely based on the life story of Carl Brashear (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a Kentucky sharecropper's son who became both the first black master diver in the U.S. Navy and the first amputee to return to active duty in the armed forces. Gooding, who has been right on the cusp of major stardom since "Jerry Maguire," inhabits the role with his customary charisma and regal bearing, so Brashear seems like a fully realized character even through the witless clichés of Scott Marshall Smith's screenplay. Director George Tillman Jr. ("Soul Food") makes his big-budget debut by painting in splashy colors on a large canvas; this is richly appointed $8 entertainment with compelling period settings and exciting underwater action scenes.
But a military career, however remarkable, doesn't offer a whole lot in the way of drama. So Smith has invented a redneck nemesis for Brashear, a fictional diving instructor unfortunately named Billy Sunday (Robert De Niro) who tries to thwart him at every turn. Until, that is -- and of course this is predictable from the first instant we see Gooding and De Niro stare deeply into each other's eyes -- Brashear's exemplary performance eventually wins the aging cracker's grudging respect. Then the two adversaries, hardened by tough love and military discipline (or at least by the bizarre hazing rituals of diving school), unite to take on the Navy brass and its pantywaist insistence on rules and regulations.
As in "The Hurricane," Norman Jewison's problematic biopic of wrongfully convicted boxer Rubin Carter, one invented character whose racism seems both deeply personal and irrational stands in for an entire system of bigotry and discrimination. As Brashear learns in his first shipboard assignment, the only jobs open to blacks in the Navy when he enlisted in the late 1940s were as cooks or officers' valets. Tillman and Smith are evidently aware that the real obstacles to Brashear's career come from institutional racism, not one hateful individual, but their efforts to broaden the film's focus are pretty feeble. (The less said about Hal Holbrook's humiliating cameo as Sunday's eccentric superior, the better.)
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