SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1994 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: This adaptation of the Broadway play is
diverting but eventually doesn't tell very much story and
left this viewer with the vague feeling that he missed some
of the point. An enigmatic young black man turns upside-down
the lives of some glib high society New Yorkers. When you
find out what is really going on, you also find it very
unlikely. Rating low +1 (-4 to +4)
BACKGROUND: Humanity is like a group of people walking around in a fog. Nobody is very far from anyone else, but you can see only the people nearest to you. And they can see only the people immediately around them. So everybody sees just a small part of the crowd. People drift closer in the fog and you see them for a while, then they move further away and cannot be traced. That, I think, is a big piece of what this film is about, thought I admit a certain fog between me and SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION. That is not a lot for a film to be about, but an odd and convoluted mode of storytelling makes this film entertaining and at the same time enigmatic. Whatever else the film is about is really in the eye of the beholder.
Our story is told in large part through flashbacks as several groups of friends, families, and acquaintances tell each other about a mysterious young black man Paul (played by Will Smith) who has insinuated himself into their lives and then has gone back out of it. Primarily we see the stories through the eyes of Ouisa and Flan Kittredge (Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland). They are wealthy pseudo-intellectual members of the upper crust. Flan makes his money through dubious trading in fine art. On a night that they are having an important dinner with a friend who might finance their next big deal, Paul shows up on their doorstep claiming to be the a friend of the Kittredge children and the son of Sidney Portier. The refined Paul makes an immediate hit and helps Flan to swing his deal. They invite Paul to stay the night only to have him hire a male hustler and bring him to the house. They throw Paul out. Almost immediately they start hearing that others of their friends have had run-ins with the same person. Soon they decide that they have to learn more about this young man who seems to know so much more about them than they know about him.
The people in this film are much like adult versions of the young people in METROPOLITAN. The have superficial conversations on profound subjects. While what they are saying seems erudite, it is only banality phrased well. What Paul says to keep up his end of the conversation occasionally does border on profundity, which makes him all the more enigmatic to the people he visits. Conversation and how things are expressed is very important to this film since so much of it is carried on by social conversations, often recounting other conversations. This slows down the plot development, but eventually this 111-minute film tells a nearly complete story that could have been told in twenty or thirty minutes. In the final analysis film is a light fantasy. The story is contrived and very unlikely to occur in the way it was told. I think that credibility is not the point here. Even the title is never clearly explained; it seems to refer to some idea that there are at most six intermediate people between anybody and anybody else in the world. Considering how isolated some tribes are to this day in the Amazon and other parts of the world, it seems very unlikely. Also it is not clear what counts as a direct adjacency.
This is a film with a terrific cast and a lack of characters. Will Smith is actually fairly charismatic as Paul, but the characters played by Channing, Sutherland, Ian McKellan, Mary Beth Hurt, Bruce Davison, Richard Masur, and Anthony Michael Hall are all quickly forgettable as indeed John Guare's screenplay based on his Broadway play would have them be. Perhaps like "Cats," this is just a play that cannot be done on the screen."
The film is a departure for director Fred Schepisi, but will not be one of his more memorable accomplishments. I give it a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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