March 24-30, 2005

movies

Two Steps Back

Race relations have improved since 1967. Filmmaking hasn't.

by Sam Adams

There's no question that race relations have progressed since 1967, the year Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was released. Unfortunately, serious, or even half-serious, filmmaking has backslid. If you were to show aliens the 1967 movie and Guess Who, its loose new remake, side by side, they might marvel at the lightness with which the new movie addresses a subject that once occasioned strenuous hand-wringing, or they might conclude that Americans are incapable of having a serious discussion about race, at least without surrounding that discussion with an enormous amount of nonsense.

Guess Who's ingenious twist is to flip-flop the original movie's dynamics: Here, it's the black family, headed up by loan officer Percy Jones (Bernie Mac), who are prosperous suburbanites, and gangly white boy Simon Green (Ashton Kutcher) who's the nervous would-be fiance. Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan, whose credits run from the TV series Frank's Place and I'll Fly Away through How Stella Got Her Groove Back (a telling trajectory in itself), takes evident pleasure in detailing the Jones' upper-middle-class lifestyle, from Percy's stylish suits to his porticoed entranceway, not to mention his knockout school-principal wife (Judith Scott) and cherished daughter Theresa (Zoë Saldaña). Mac's imperious swagger is that of a man who has worked hard to get his life exactly the way he wants it — a plan that distinctly does not include the prospect of a white son-in-law.

The trouble with Guess Who isn't just the lack of comic chemistry between Kutcher and Mac, or Kutcher and Saldaña, or Kutcher and anyone — to be fair, the limited actor is saddled with a role that requires him to be a heartthrob one moment, a gawky buffoon the next — but that the movie is practically desperate to avoid its own subject. Its most telling scenes are not the explicit confrontations between Simon and his dubious future father-in-law, or his heartfelt talks with his future fiancee, but the moment when the two men sit in Percy's uncomfortably silent Cadillac while the radio blares pop-miscegenation classics like "Walk on the Wild Side" and "Black Betty," or Simon cracks up a dinner table full of Theresa's relatives with mildly racist jokes until he pushes things one step too far. Such moments advertise the extent to which Guess Who's central dilemma is already ingrained in the culture, which is exactly what makes the movie's failure to advance the discussion inexcusable. The movie bears signs of having been dumbed down in postproduction, especially by the smothering use of on-the-nose pop songs that often threaten to drown out the dialogue (itself no great loss). But chances are it was doomed at the start by the filmmakers' — or, more likely, the studio's — low estimation of its audience's intelligence. Whether such a calculation represents racism or a broader form of contempt, only the aliens can say for sure.

Guess Who Directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan A Sony Pictures release Opens Friday at area theaters