Black and White 1 and 1/2 Stars (Out of 4) Reviewed by Mac VerStandig critic@moviereviews.org http://www.moviereviews.org April 17, 2000
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Imagine Larry Clark's Kids with big name stars and a director conflicted about what can and cannot be shown on screen. The shock value is lost. That is exactly what Black and White is, an honest look at the streets of New York City that has little effect on the viewer.
The film opens with a certain sexual act involving two Caucasian girls and an African-American guy in the not-so-thick woods. Little kids look on as their presumably virgin-eyes are corrupted. This is undoubtedly the film's most effective scene because a) the three actors are unknown to most audiences, which provides a certain reality, and b) it is the most graphic that the movie has to offer. From there on, everything is downhill.
Director James Toback attempts to tap one of Generation X's most peculiar traits: upper-class white teenagers attempting to infiltrate lower-class black society. His characters can be divided into three basic groups: trust-fund teens that meet the above criteria, poor black teens that want to make a better life for themselves and poor black teens that seem to altogether lack such drive. He also includes a freelance documentary filmmaker (Brooke Shields), her gay husband (Robert Downey Jr. who is one of the film's highlights), boxer Mike Tyson (as himself) and a disgruntled undercover detective (Ben Stiller).
The language used in Black and White is, in a way, very revealing. A classroom scene shows that the teenagers' teachers care. Yet their vocabularies are a dense version of broken English perhaps most similar to Ebonics. Although the infamous language of Mark Furman is considered derogatory, a similar word, `niga,' apparently isn't. In the aforementioned class, kids swear and no one flinches. Yet when such language is used at fancy dinner tables, the teens' parents are outraged. There is a great contradiction between street settings and home settings, yet the movie's subjects haven't figured that out.
Mid-film finds one of the few actual plot moments; a murder is committed. The most surprising thing about this scene isn't that the New York City District Attorney's son commits the murder or that the victim dies almost immediately, but rather the tame nature of how this is shown. For a film that apparently seeks to shock, a little blood might have been appropriate.
The same can be said of the sex, or lack thereof. Other than the aforementioned opening, no such acts are shown on screen. The characters constantly talk about it, and much happens off screen, but Toback seems to have gotten scared for reasons unapparent to this critic. Perhaps it is that big name stars like Elijah Wood, Claudia Schiffer and Gaby Hoffman aren't willing to show themselves on screen; an argument for a lesser-known cast.
The ultimate goal of Black and White is to make the viewer ask him or herself questions. Here's one to start with: `What else is playing at the local theatre?'
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