October 2- 8, 2003
movies
A Little of This...
 Heís the sheriff: Denzel Washington (right) is Out of Time.  |
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Carl Franklin adds race consciousness to action-movie formula, but which wins out?
As script-to-screen transformations go, Out of Time’s might be considered run-of-the-mill: a shift in locale from Buffalo, N.Y., to small-town Florida, and from an all-white cast of characters to one that now includes Denzel Washington, Sanaa Lathan and Eva Mendes. On its own, the movie is a rote thriller, if structurally old-fashioned -- meaning the hero doesn’t start spinning through a series of increasingly improbable plot twists until 40 minutes into the movie, rather than 10. But if nothing else, it’s worth noting for the fact that it reteams Washington with Carl Franklin, who directed him in Devil in a Blue Dress. That Washington and Franklin have reunited seven years later to make an entirely different kind of movie says a lot about how both men’s careers have advanced, but even more about the movie business and its rules.
An adaptation of the first in Walter Mosley's highly successful series of period crime novels, Devil was touted at the time as a possible franchise-starter, but the movie "underperformed," which is to say, it made money, but not as much as the studio hoped. The result seemed to confirm long-held Hollywood prejudices against noir, against historical dramas and against movies with largely- or all-black casts. "Critically, [Devil] went beyond people's expectations," Franklin explained at the Toronto Film Festival last month. "But that genre is typically not that strong out of the box. Plus, I don't think the movie was marketed that well. [Don Cheadle's character] Mouse wasn't in the TV ads, and they did no black radio, which is almost more important in the black community than TV."
Since Devil, Franklin has sharpened his claws on more conventional studio product: 1998's One True Thing and last year's High Crimes. At first glance, and even second, Out of Time is no different, but within the tightly scripted roles of the Hollywood thriller, you can see Franklin's name scrawled in the margins. Eva Mendes, who plays ex-wife to Washington's small-town police chief, told a small gathering of reporters, "One of the things about this film that I'm so in love with is that there's two interracial relationships, never once is it mentioned. Never once is it an issue. I love that Carl did that."
Franklin confirms that the movie's multiracial casting was his doing, although it had as much to do with Hollywood rules as his own vision of the world. "Quite honestly, when we broke form and went with Denzel, there was of course concern on the studio's part about demographics; if you have a black cast, [the movie] won't necessarily bring back the same kind of returns as if you have a mixed cast."
One of the movie's few overt acknowledgments of race -- a moment that's sure to elicit vocal reactions from audiences -- came about less as a "social comment" than as a way to solve the plot problems posed by a black chief of police in a small South Florida town. When the woman he's been having an affair with (Lathan) is found dead along with her abusive husband (Dean Cain), Washington is naturally concerned that he'll be the prime suspect, especially since he'd planned to leave town with her the night she was murdered, and was seen by a neighbor pounding on her door in the dead of night. He's nearly cornered when the neighbor turns up at the police station to work with a sketch artist: Spying Washington across the room, she yells out, "He looked like him!" After a pause, the room erupts in laughter, and the embarrassed woman points at another black man who's just crossing the room. "Maybe it was more like him."
The scene, never in the script -- whose author, incidentally, is a white frat boy whose only previous experience is a stint on the TV show Family Guy -- was devised by Franklin purely out of necessity. "In this small town, where presumably there are not a lot of black people, it would've been illogical for this woman to see the guy and not know it was Denzel, because there are a limited number of black people in town. So we decided to use that, rather than treat it as a mistake. But it actually came from what could have been a problem for us."
Franklin admits that the movie is flyweight by his standards: "Normally I look for some strong social context, but this one just entertained the hell out of me." Washington, addressing a half-dozen reporters, reels off what's become a line about using the movie to decompress after the rigors of Antwone Fisher: "What I did for research was I swam and I fished." But it's worth noting that it's in such shallow waters that Franklin has come up with his first movie with a black lead character since Devil in a Blue Dress, and one that's getting the marketing that Devil never had. If it's successful, Franklin hopes to advance a project he's had in the works, an "ancient piece" called The Last Pharaoh, set in Nubian Egypt, which would be the first of its kind. As for a sequel to Devil, a question that comes up so often Washington starts answering it before it's been fully asked, "It'd have to be a labor of love. And it'd have to be made for a price."
Out of Time opens Friday at area theaters. See Sam Adams’ review on p. 36.
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