I
miss the teenage movies of the 80s, lighthearted films about parties,
crushes, detention. It was all so simple. Everyone was pretty
and happy and well … white. Maybe that's why those movies
were so simple. Black teenagers just don't grow up that way...or
so the movie industry wanted you to believe.
In
the 90's and 00's, we were introduced to the new wave of teenage
films, this time sporting inter-racial relationships in an attempt
to differentiate the times and also, I assume, to relate how far
we've come as a society. Save the Last Dance and Finding Forrester
are both recently released films where these themes are displayed.
But instead of Molly Ringwald, we're given Julia Stiles and Rob
Brown.
Save
the Last Dance. The plot in a nutshell, Sara's (Julia Stiles)
mother dies and she moves in with her jazz musician father (Terry
Kinney) in the Southside of Chicago. Sara must "assimilate"
to fit in. She makes some black friends and realizes her dream
of dancing. (As I've just given away the "secret", you
don't really have to see the movie now. But if you insist on being
stubborn, keep reading. Just remember, I'm trying to
save you $9.)
Save
the Last Dance was marketed brilliantly. The ads where the couple
actually kiss are shown exclusively on MTV after 8pm and on BET,
so as to not offend anyone. The trailer was created strategically
to make the film seem like a lighthearted Dirty Dancing for the
new millennium. But, Save the Last Dance features a white actress
and a black actor, and whether or not we want to admit it, these
factors make the film not so much about learning how to do the
Merengue, as about an inter-racial relationship. Period. Save
the Last Dance makes race a central issue and theme. But this
strategy doesn't work for several reasons and not all of them
are race related.
In
the film, Julia Stiles gives a good performance, but the supporting
characters exist purely to complement her. Sean Patrick Thomas
as Derek gives a bland performance but it is not entirely his
fault. Derek is an Honors student, a diplomat, going to Georgetown
in the fall, (oops, I gave away his one plot point) and fighting
to stay out of the bad element of the other African-American men
in the film. Every positive decision he comes to in the film is
due to Sara and he exists to support her growth. He shows her
"some moves" to
help her fit in, but you never know why he knows dance steps that
an advanced instructor at Steps couldn't put together (I am still
not quite sure why they cast him other than he is a familiar face
from his other inter-racial jaunt with Selma Blair in Cruel Intentions).
He looks waaay too old to be in high school. Waay too old.
The
dialogue is also really bad. I am so sick of 40 year old men sitting
in a room hypothesizing about what teenagers talk about and coming
up with early 80s gems like, "This is an A and B conversation
so C your way out of it." Save the Last Dance wants to be
funny and compelling, but all it does is take itself too seriously.
How
I tried to reconcile this movie was in its' attempts to deal with
the African-American reaction to inter-racial dating. But when
Chenille (Kerri Washington), Derek's sister and Sara's friend,
confronts her about black women being upset over her taking "the
last good black man" and for her to open her pretty brown
eyes not only to how other people feel about them as a couple
but also about what the community that she is visiting is going
through, I was intrigued. I thought, finally, a black female character
that can show her rage. I am not saying that how she feels is
right or even justified but the fact that she later apologizes
for it shows that movies do not want to have a real, complicated
debate about a real, complicated issue. For now, this is Sara's
world and she is just visiting long enough to learn some dance
steps and move on out.
I
will cut the film some slack. The movie is brave in two important
ways. (Warning: Important plot information given out here. You
can figure it out on your own but just in case you still haven't
been turned off of this movie, and I'm doing my damdest, you should
skip this riveting paragraph.) Sara and Derek have sex and they
stay together. Teenagers have sex in movies often but an inter-racial
couple having sex and remaining in a relationship that ends positively
is pretty landmark (See Zebrahead). You do want these two characters
to stay together and that's something. I guess.
Good
Will H … I mean, Finding Forrester is about Jamal Wallace,
an African-American prodigy that gets a scholarship to an exclusive
private school. (The private school outcast story told a million
times in the eighties and so expertly done in Michael Jackson's
Bad video starring Wesley Snipes as the requisite neighborhood
gang member/bad influence/friend.) Anna Paquin and Rob Brown have
a flirtation that is only realized over a basketball game (I won't
even go there.) They later hold hands, or rather, she puts her
hand on his. But that's about as romantic as it gets.
With
these new landmarks, I hope that inter-racial relationships in
films will be handled a bit more realistically and a bit less
cliché. But, every film has to have some cliché
metaphor for the differences between them. In Save the Last Dance,
it was Malakai, Derek's best friend's, line to Sara, "You
two don't fit. They're like oil and you're like milk." What?!
In Finding Forrester, when Anna Paquin's character, Claire (who
does this weird smirking thing every time she is in screen) delivers
this gem to Rob Brown (Jamal), "Jamal, why do you see everything
in black and white."
However,
Finding Forrester never pretends to be about inter-racial relationships.
Van Sant is smart enough to understand that he doesn't really
want to go there because that becomes what the movie is about.
It handles the complicated issue of how race and class are intertwined.
There is the black, rich kid who wants Jamal to understand that--although
they are black--they are not really alike and the snotty administration
that recruited Jamal for basketball and cannot handle a black
man that is smart and plays basketball, that
doesn't want to deal with Jamal beyond the limitations that make
him easier to deal with...limitations that completely surround
the black characters in Save the Last Dance.
Still,
it is Good Will Hunting all over again. Take out Robin Williams
and add Sean Connery and you have a tale of a troubled genius
who finds his stride through an eccentric mentor. If this were
that movie and the burgeoning relationship between Claire and
Jamal were Minnie Driver and Matt Damon, I guarantee you that
it would have been a bit more realized. The single difference
is race and it is a stumbling block that not just
movie executives but America in general does not want to deal
with. Race invokes history, ups the ante so to speak. Race changes
things. But it is only through a thorough exploration of race
relationships that we can make better movies.
