OK, a simple little BLACK AND WHITE review, well maybe not so simple. Father Geek received this today at Geek Headquarters in Austin...
BLACK AND WHITE
by Particle Man
I have to hand it to James Toback: he really had me going for a while. For a while, I really believed that _Black and White_ was going to be about something. We haven't had a film of late that's taken stock of the current state of race relations -- the last one I can recall is Spike Lee's _Jungle Fever_, for whatever that's worth. _Black and White_ held the potential of bringing us up to date on the issue. Potential only partly fulfilled, as it turns out.
I'm not well acquainted with Toback's work. The only other thing of his I've seen is _Two Girls and a Guy_, a film that neatly divided all who saw it into one of two camps: you either thought its story of a lothario whose duplicity is exposed by two lovers was a wickedly incisive examination of sex in the nineties, or you thought the mostly-improvised, extended dialogue scenes between actors Robert Downey Jr, Natasha Gregson Wagner, and Heather Graham were the height of self-indulgence. I fell into the latter camp, finding the aura of masturbatory reflexiveness all the more intolerable for my knowledge of Toback's rep as a legendary womanizer (thus turning the story of a philanderer undone by the women who both revile and crave him into a form of bragging -- Fellini did that too, but he had the grace to model his struttings as farce), and for the director's seeming unwillingness to pull his actors from the precipice of their own inanity (handy hint: if you're going to have your actors improvise a conversation about polygamy, make sure at least _one_ of them knows the word. Allowing them to bandy about the term "Mormonism" as if it means something succeeds only in increasing our contempt).
Still, anyone has to be given his due who's daring enough to gather together the likes of Jared Leto, Ben Stiller, Bijou Phillips, and the Wu-Tang Clan's Oli "Power" Grant and Corey "Raekwon" Woods for an examination of the collision between affluent urban teens and the kings of gangsta rap. I went into _Black and White_ hoping that, once Toback had been drawn away from the intoxication of his own reflection, he would find a way of capitalizing on this variegated cast, bringing us something with more human truth than what usually gets handed to us as "relevant" story-telling.
To the extent that Toback actually goes after his point, _Black and White_ does demonstrate the strengths of the director's technique. Even when the set-ups seem lifted from the culture-clash playbook -- rebellious teenager confronts conservative parents at the dinner table; rap stars try to book recording time from a reluctant studio owner -- the improvised exchanges often result in a spiky verisimilitude that transcends cliche. Both Power, as gangsta rapper -- and maybe actual gangster -- Rich Bower, and Raekwon as friend Cigar deliver relaxed, believable performances, although it's hard to tell whether they're playing rappers amused by the fawning of the affluent, willowy white kids who court them, or if they're just two, actual rappers amused by the attentions of crew and co-stars. Toback in any case scores points by the very conjunction of his performers -- the music of the rappers' street inflections plays as counterpoint against the cadences of their white cast-mates, while the wide spectrum of characters and the layering-on of their storylines -- think _Nashville_ with a solid backbeat -- goes a long way towards selling the contrast between blacks seeking affluence on their own terms and the children of privilege straining for a sometimes skewed notion of street cred. By the time that _Vanity Fair_'s elegant (and black) contributing editor George Wayne walks on in a cameo role, it appears that Toback is actually going to build to a sharp observation of how people aspire to lives not their own.
But almost from the start, the director's obsessions conspire to undo him. For every cliche that he succeeds in overcoming, there are three more that intrude upon our attention: Brooke Shields shows up as a clueless, digital-vidcam-toting documentary filmmaker (for whom? For herself, apparently); Robert Downey Jr. minces on in a painfully obvious performance as Shields' omnisexual husband. The high-life for the rappers is represented by debauched, redundant sex scenes -- always, it seems, two-on-one. (What is it with Toback and this configuration? How are we supposed to feel? Shocked? Envious? Aroused?) A plot-line of sorts kicks in, involving a police sting operation directed at Bower, but in the improvised interplay it becomes strangely unfocussed. (Curiously, for all that this event goads the rapper into criminal acts, we're not clued in as to why the police are after him to begin with. I fear that Toback wants us to believe that he's being pursued for the crime of being an upwardly mobile black man -- another cliche). And at last, Toback seemingly can't sustain his theme, withdrawing almost completely from his black actors and their teen hangers-on to resort to the narcissistic "personal" dynamics that muddied _Two Girls and a Guy_. Maybe the director's trying to make an oil-and-water point in this abandonment, but by closing with scenes in which Robert Downey has a showy temper tantrum in the middle of the street, and Ben Stiller -- as a gambler with one of the most unbelievable character arcs in film history -- natters on interminably, Toback only serves to convince us that self-obsession is a poor substitute for a compelling story-line.
So _Black and White_ winds up more miss than hit. Still, we get a glimpse here of the candor that can be uncovered in Toback's improvisational style, and it's a beguiling view. I'd give him another shot, if only to see if he can beat the odds and tell a story that doesn't eventually devolve into the filmic equivalent of rapid, jerking motions in the crotchal area. I'm not holding out much hope, though -- it takes discipline to engage the audience rather than indulge your own fixations and, from what I've seen, I'm not yet sure that Toback can rally that much control. I'd like to see him try, though -- his gifts are just too precious.
