NY Times Article on IR Love On-Screen
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
When It Comes to Casting, Love Conquers Color By CARYN JAMES
Pick your examples shrewdly enough and it can seem as if all of culture, high and low, is awash in colorblind casting. In the new Broadway production of "Julius Caesar," Denzel Washington as Brutus plays opposite Jessica Hecht, a white actress, as his wife. As "Friends" drew to a close, David Schwimmer's character dated a woman played by Aisha Tyler, a situation so unremarkable that none of the friends bothered mentioning that she was black.
And in "Sideways," the Asian character played by Sandra Oh, who has a fling with a white man played by Thomas Haden Church, is the mother of a black child, a mélange of races that was accepted without comment, too.
But only a fool would think we've reached some racial utopia, and at the moment interracial romance is a popular and thorny subject. "Guess Who," the loose comic remake of the 1967 chestnut "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," takes a blithe love-conquers-all approach, reversing the races so that Bernie Mac, in the Spencer Tracy role, is the father who's shocked when his daughter brings home a white guy, played by Ashton Kutcher. Neil LaBute's new, typically corrosive play, "This Is How It Goes," deals with an interracial love triangle and exposes the venomous attitudes behind the facade of polite acceptance.
Small independent films have taken up the subject, too. In the current "Face" a young Chinese-American woman falls for a black man, and in "A Wake in Providence," scheduled to open next month, an Italian-American brings his black fiancée home.
The small films' ethnic twists suggest how the subject has morphed since "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," but the distance between the Bernie Mac movie and the Neil LaBute play is more telling.
Their polarized approaches reflect something other than the difference between a lame Hollywood comedy and an ambitious, bitterly comic play; they mirror the difference between slapping a bandage on a wound and painfully poking around to see how bad it really is.
Then there's Mr. Kutcher, who seems to want it both ways. In his film, conquering the racial divide is the simple matter of some tired comedy and a weekend with the prospective in-laws. Yet promoting his movie recently on "Access Hollywood," he said that when he was hanging out with Sean Combs, people looked at them funny. As Mr. Kutcher put it, the strange looks didn't come because anyone was baffled by the friendship between "the kid from Iowa and the hip-hop mogul" (that would have been plausible). No, he added, "It was: I'm white and he's black. What are these two doing hanging out together?"
O.K., Ashton Kutcher is no social critic. But unless he and his pal had time-traveled back to the Jim Crow South, it's hard to believe that the world was aghast at an interracial show-business friendship. The fact that Mr. Kutcher could even trot out this improbable example tells us how muddled the conversation about race can be.
"Guess Who" adds little to the conversation. It's slyest, funniest move is to transpose black and white stereotypes. When the white boyfriend arrives, the black father mistakes him for the help; and here it's the white man who has been raised by a hard-working single mother.
But when the daughter tells her father that she knows life will be rough if she marries a white man, the moment seems false. "You should hear the things people say to us," she tells him. Those things may be said in life, but (despite a scene in which Mr. Kutcher is prodded into telling black jokes at dinner), not in this Hollywood confection in which every problem is wrapped up breezily.
The new "Guess Who" inherits its blithe attitude from the old "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," which was never a great or demanding film either. It has become such a cultural touchstone that its title long ago entered the language as a catchphrase.
But the earnest, preachy movie was creaky in its own day. "It never occurred to me that I'd fall in love with a Negro," Katharine Houghton says perkily as the daughter. Reminded that her fiancé, the flawless Sidney Poitier character, is a very important doctor, she answers, "And when I'm married to him I'll be important!" This tame vision of middle-class liberalism was sent out into the world of the Rolling Stones, the Vietnam War, Black Power and women's liberation. No wonder the remake is so timid.
A tirade of horrible things is said in "This Is How It Goes," but Mr. LaBute's acerbic pessimism may not be any more accurate a reflection of the world than the superficially cheerful "Guess Who." It is certainly more gripping and thoughtful, as Ben Stiller's unnamed character, an admittedly unreliable narrator, returns to his hometown. Belinda (Amanda Peet), the preppy whiter-than-white former cheerleader he adored in high school is now married to a successful black businessman, Cody (Jeffrey Wright).
Just as Mr. LaBute dealt with ugly attitudes about an obese woman in the recent "Fat Pig," and as David Mamet satirizes anti-Semitism and homophobia in the current "Romance," here he depicts the bigotry that erupts from apparently civilized characters. In "This Is How It Goes," some people use others as mercilessly as they did Mr. LaBute's film "In the Company of Men," yet race is more than an excuse on which to hang his latest misanthropic characters. The Stiller character's tirades are so pointedly racial that they become chilling evocations of the hatred that lurks beneath what he calls "the good side of me, the educated portion." Like much of what he says, this is too bluntly stated, but it's the play's most truthful admission.
Belinda herself says that she married Cody partly to get attention. Interracial marriage, she says, "might be old hat in a place like New York, or wherever, but around here it's still a pretty big deal." But where are they? Mr. LaBute never specifies beyond the setting, "a small town in America," which weakens the play. How small or remote does the town have to be to qualify as racist?
Both the unsettling "This Is How It Goes" and the flippant "Guess Who" are victims of their extreme approaches. Oddly, the slick Hollywood movie may come closer to reality by hinting at how racism is diminishing through the generations. It's the grandfather in the film who vocally disapproves when his granddaughter brings home a white man; the parents are more circumspect; and for the engaged couple race matters only when other people make it an issue.
In the shrewd and believable "Face," it's the Chinese woman's grandmother who is mortified when Genie, the granddaughter, takes up with a black man. "People don't mind mixed-race couples," Genie's boyfriend says. "Do you know what year it is?"
"Year of the rat," she says, suggesting how hard it is to escape generations of old attitudes.
But race is not an issue for the 30-something characters in "Friends" or the slightly older characters in "Sideways." Maybe that was the problem when Ashton Kutcher and Sean Combs got those funny looks. Could they have been hanging out with people from their grandparents' generation?
When It Comes to Casting, Love Conquers Color By CARYN JAMES
Pick your examples shrewdly enough and it can seem as if all of culture, high and low, is awash in colorblind casting. In the new Broadway production of "Julius Caesar," Denzel Washington as Brutus plays opposite Jessica Hecht, a white actress, as his wife. As "Friends" drew to a close, David Schwimmer's character dated a woman played by Aisha Tyler, a situation so unremarkable that none of the friends bothered mentioning that she was black.
And in "Sideways," the Asian character played by Sandra Oh, who has a fling with a white man played by Thomas Haden Church, is the mother of a black child, a mélange of races that was accepted without comment, too.
But only a fool would think we've reached some racial utopia, and at the moment interracial romance is a popular and thorny subject. "Guess Who," the loose comic remake of the 1967 chestnut "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," takes a blithe love-conquers-all approach, reversing the races so that Bernie Mac, in the Spencer Tracy role, is the father who's shocked when his daughter brings home a white guy, played by Ashton Kutcher. Neil LaBute's new, typically corrosive play, "This Is How It Goes," deals with an interracial love triangle and exposes the venomous attitudes behind the facade of polite acceptance.
Small independent films have taken up the subject, too. In the current "Face" a young Chinese-American woman falls for a black man, and in "A Wake in Providence," scheduled to open next month, an Italian-American brings his black fiancée home.
The small films' ethnic twists suggest how the subject has morphed since "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," but the distance between the Bernie Mac movie and the Neil LaBute play is more telling.
Their polarized approaches reflect something other than the difference between a lame Hollywood comedy and an ambitious, bitterly comic play; they mirror the difference between slapping a bandage on a wound and painfully poking around to see how bad it really is.
Then there's Mr. Kutcher, who seems to want it both ways. In his film, conquering the racial divide is the simple matter of some tired comedy and a weekend with the prospective in-laws. Yet promoting his movie recently on "Access Hollywood," he said that when he was hanging out with Sean Combs, people looked at them funny. As Mr. Kutcher put it, the strange looks didn't come because anyone was baffled by the friendship between "the kid from Iowa and the hip-hop mogul" (that would have been plausible). No, he added, "It was: I'm white and he's black. What are these two doing hanging out together?"
O.K., Ashton Kutcher is no social critic. But unless he and his pal had time-traveled back to the Jim Crow South, it's hard to believe that the world was aghast at an interracial show-business friendship. The fact that Mr. Kutcher could even trot out this improbable example tells us how muddled the conversation about race can be.
"Guess Who" adds little to the conversation. It's slyest, funniest move is to transpose black and white stereotypes. When the white boyfriend arrives, the black father mistakes him for the help; and here it's the white man who has been raised by a hard-working single mother.
But when the daughter tells her father that she knows life will be rough if she marries a white man, the moment seems false. "You should hear the things people say to us," she tells him. Those things may be said in life, but (despite a scene in which Mr. Kutcher is prodded into telling black jokes at dinner), not in this Hollywood confection in which every problem is wrapped up breezily.
The new "Guess Who" inherits its blithe attitude from the old "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," which was never a great or demanding film either. It has become such a cultural touchstone that its title long ago entered the language as a catchphrase.
But the earnest, preachy movie was creaky in its own day. "It never occurred to me that I'd fall in love with a Negro," Katharine Houghton says perkily as the daughter. Reminded that her fiancé, the flawless Sidney Poitier character, is a very important doctor, she answers, "And when I'm married to him I'll be important!" This tame vision of middle-class liberalism was sent out into the world of the Rolling Stones, the Vietnam War, Black Power and women's liberation. No wonder the remake is so timid.
A tirade of horrible things is said in "This Is How It Goes," but Mr. LaBute's acerbic pessimism may not be any more accurate a reflection of the world than the superficially cheerful "Guess Who." It is certainly more gripping and thoughtful, as Ben Stiller's unnamed character, an admittedly unreliable narrator, returns to his hometown. Belinda (Amanda Peet), the preppy whiter-than-white former cheerleader he adored in high school is now married to a successful black businessman, Cody (Jeffrey Wright).
Just as Mr. LaBute dealt with ugly attitudes about an obese woman in the recent "Fat Pig," and as David Mamet satirizes anti-Semitism and homophobia in the current "Romance," here he depicts the bigotry that erupts from apparently civilized characters. In "This Is How It Goes," some people use others as mercilessly as they did Mr. LaBute's film "In the Company of Men," yet race is more than an excuse on which to hang his latest misanthropic characters. The Stiller character's tirades are so pointedly racial that they become chilling evocations of the hatred that lurks beneath what he calls "the good side of me, the educated portion." Like much of what he says, this is too bluntly stated, but it's the play's most truthful admission.
Belinda herself says that she married Cody partly to get attention. Interracial marriage, she says, "might be old hat in a place like New York, or wherever, but around here it's still a pretty big deal." But where are they? Mr. LaBute never specifies beyond the setting, "a small town in America," which weakens the play. How small or remote does the town have to be to qualify as racist?
Both the unsettling "This Is How It Goes" and the flippant "Guess Who" are victims of their extreme approaches. Oddly, the slick Hollywood movie may come closer to reality by hinting at how racism is diminishing through the generations. It's the grandfather in the film who vocally disapproves when his granddaughter brings home a white man; the parents are more circumspect; and for the engaged couple race matters only when other people make it an issue.
In the shrewd and believable "Face," it's the Chinese woman's grandmother who is mortified when Genie, the granddaughter, takes up with a black man. "People don't mind mixed-race couples," Genie's boyfriend says. "Do you know what year it is?"
"Year of the rat," she says, suggesting how hard it is to escape generations of old attitudes.
But race is not an issue for the 30-something characters in "Friends" or the slightly older characters in "Sideways." Maybe that was the problem when Ashton Kutcher and Sean Combs got those funny looks. Could they have been hanging out with people from their grandparents' generation?
