Black and White
“I am not what I am,” quoted from Shakespeare in an urban high school in New York City. Like Iago, these characters are all play-acting. Aside from the upper class white kids living the inner-city black hip-hop lifestyle and the inner city blacks looking toward the upscale white entrepreneurs to promote their blackness, we’ve got a gay man married to a woman, and a detective (a convincingly pathetic Ben Stiller) more criminal than those he’s tailing. Not only are the characters confused, but the actors are wonderfully mismatched: Brook Shields playing a dreadlocked documentarian looking for her nose ring; Claudia Schiffer philosophising with twenty cent words in front of the cameras (and she does a superb job); Mike Tyson giving advice about the misuse of violence. Black and White is a mixed-mesh of race, gender and culture — no easy feat. The soundtrack, however, doesn’t gel with the message. Notice the airy fifties pop tunes that play quietly and indiscreetly between the more notable ebonic-funk rap songs.
Writer/director James Toback, best known for his cult film Fingers and his Oscar nominated screenplay Bugsy, and most recently remembered for his seemingly ad-libbed Two Girls and a Guy, brings to the screen a new vision of America which isn’t so new at all. There’s not a black/white war with guns and bigoted cops. There’s no emotional coming out to family and friends or even to oneself. There’s no block party happening within a mixed-suburban community. Nothing is obvious and (aside from Robert Downey Jr.’s script being too blatantly homosexual) nothing’s stereotypical. Nothing is how it seems and nothing is black and white. Could Toback have put his finger on something big? Life beyond Hollywood?
Heather Johnson
