BLACK AND WHITE

BLACK AND WHITE (2000) **1/2

blackwhite.jpg (18199 bytes) Reviewed 4/7/00

Writer-director James Toback's Black and White made some waves some months ago when the MPAA gave it an NC-17 for the film's first scene, a sex scene. Toback cut it by about a second to get an R. He enraged the MPAA however when he posted both the NC-17 and R versions of the scene on the internet to show how absurd the change was.

The scene in question involves a threesome, two teenage white girls and an older black man in the middle of Central Park, and Black and White is a look at upper middle class white youth's fascination with hip-hop attitude. While the film generates some provocative ideas, for once, this is a movie where the plot gets in the way. Many of the scenes are improvised, and as such, the film as a whole mirrors the strengths and weakness of improvisation. I suspect the plot suffered as a result -- it is haphazard and filled with coincidences. On the other hand, the spontaneity of improv delivers a few scenes of startling candidness, particularly with regard to Mike Tyson.

The white teenagers in the film, who are drawn to urban hip-hop by the power of its insouciance, are simultaneously lacking in an understanding of the antecedent to that culture, namely racism. The lifestyle is both identified with oppression and yields a strong identity as a response to that oppression. That identity provides comfort, a sense of belonging, to its members, but also has self-defeating aspects. One that has been made much of for example is the looking down on education as the ways of the white world. To some of these in the white world, particularly one Charlie (Bijou Phillips), the hip-hop sensibility is a rebellious pose. Charlie seems aware that she is being superficial, but she simply does not care. Toback intentionally caricatures these white characters, poking fun at them for romanticizing the very social stratification many blacks want to escape. At the same time however, Toback is too reductive in lumping hip-hop with gangsters and crime. All the black characters end up being conventional black stereotypes. Virtually every one of them is a gangster, and the one who isn't is a basketball player.

The head gangster, Rich, and his sidekick, Cigar, are played by Power and Raekwon, original members of the Wu-Tang Clan. Rich, an extortionist, gets off on his white followers, having threesomes with Charlie and her friend, Kim (Kim Matulova). Black and White follows Rich's travails toward becoming a rap star while worried about a potential betrayal by a childhood friend. Power gives a strangely detached performance, as if he knows he's in a movie.

Intermingling is documentarian, Sam Donager (Brook Shields), and her gay husband, Terry (Robert Downey Jr.), who are trying to make a documentary on the white kids acting black. Sam is a parody of the white liberal (Shields gets in a dig at NYU film students) while Terry acts as a lightning rod for homophobia from both whites and blacks in the film. In the latter case, it's an ironic commentary on those who are subject to racism practicing a form of discrimination themselves.

The most unbelievable and exasperating character of all is Greta (Claudia Schiffer) who is embroiled in a scheme with the aforementioned basketball player, Dean (real-life New York Knicks guard Allan Houston) and duplicitous Mark Clear (Ben Stiller). Her actions are those that could only happen in a movie (and we're talking about James Bond double agent-style ridiculousness here). It doesn't help that Schiffer can't act a lick and that we know nothing about Greta other than that she's a graduate student into race relations.

Mike Tyson appears here as himself, and if his scenes are the most interesting in the movie, it is not without a sense that he is being exploited. Tyson comes off as either immensely stupid or immensely vile with neither being mutually exclusive. In one scene, Tyson, sounding utterly foolish, counsels Rich on a life or death matter and is seemingly ignorant of the ramifications. The line of the film is when Downey's Terry comes on to Tyson and Tyson replies, "Look here, I'm on parole," then he proceeds to viciously attack Terry.

Black and White finally raises more questions than answers, which is perhaps inevitable with a subject like this, but Toback's ludicrously implausible plot really takes away from his thematic concerns. Toback might think the abrupt ending, showing what has happened to the characters six months later, is cute, but it is really a cop out.