Dear Elvis,
Your message arrived in my inbox and I couldn’t open it with UULite, StuffIt Expander, or DeBabelizer. E-mail is still not quite a universal medium when a user who has been online for 18 years and writes a column for a Web magazine can’t open a binary attachment. Eventually a small, dim light bulb illuminated above my head, and I simply went to the Slate Web site–where, of course, your posting was waiting.
I had a real problem with The Best Man, and maybe this is the best place to talk about it. I went to see it at Toronto, and found it static and talky. I left after an hour, because I had another screening next door I had to attend, and because I thought perhaps on a fresh day, freed from the back-to-back festival screening routine, it might look different. On a second viewing back in Chicago, it did not, and I passed it to another Sun-Times critic, just to give it another shot.
I thought The Best Man was similar to, and inferior to, The Wood, which came out in July and was also a movie about high-school friends having a reunion at a wedding. The Wood had many of the same qualities of The Best Man, but more life and spirit, and it knew a lot more about how to use a camera instead of lining up the characters for prolonged heart-to-hearts.
I know what you mean about the Michael Clarke Duncan character in The Green Mile. His function is essentially to absorb and process white pain, suffering, disease, and guilt, which he does visibly–which is a novel change from the decades of films in which black characters have done the same thing invisibly (is there much difference between what Duncan does for Hanks here and what Poitier did for Steiger in In the Heat of the Night?). I also wondered whether a Louisiana death row would have been integrated in 1935, and whether all but one of its guards would have been so decent and humane.
On the other hand, I wonder whether African-American characters (and actors) should be subjected to the kind of unspoken test that no white actor or character ever has to face. No one ever asks whether a white actor, as a white actor, should have played a given role. And if John Coffey had been played by a white giant like Ron Perlman, for example, character and race would have gone unremarked.
I remember Morgan Freeman’s regret as he told me that the recent role he most wanted was Hannibal Lecter–“but of course they couldn’t let a black man play a villain like that.” Since Freeman is one of the few actors I can think of who might have equaled or improved on Anthony Hopkins’ performance, I share his regret that for no-doubt pious liberal reasons a black actor could not be considered.
This just in: The African-American actor Harry J. Lennix does a superb job of playing Aaron, the arch-villain in Titus, although Anthony Hopkins, of course, gets to bake Tamora’s sons into two meat pies.
Best,
Roger
