Director James Toback fancies himself a provocateur, and from the very first scene it's obvious he intends "Black and White" to be a startling expose of what happens when white teens try to impress the gangsta rappers they adore. The film opens with rich kid Charlie (Bijou Phillips) engaged in a tryst with another young woman and Rich (Wu-Tang Clan's Oli "Power" Grant), a thug who dreams of becoming a music industry mogul.
What does Charlie want? She doesn't appear to know -- "I wanna be black," she bleats when the question is asked -- and certainly Toback, who also wrote this weird mess, hasn't got a clue. Maybe it's a bout of adolescent rebellion, maybe it's her idea of true love, or maybe she's just trying to fit in with her trendy friends.
At any rate, Charlie's not the only character in "Black and White" who seems unbalanced. Toback also trots out an airheaded documentary filmmaker named Sam (Brooke Shields) who's in denial about her flagrantly gay husband Terry (Robert Downey Jr.); Will (William Lee Scott), the son of a district attorney who's thrown away his life of privilege to work as an errand boy for Rich and his crew; Dean (Allen Houston), who dreams of glory in the NBA but seems to take all of two seconds to decide whether or not he wants to throw a college basketball game for $50,000; and Greta (Claudia Schiffer), an anthropology student who behaves like some kind of double-agent as she betrays all the men in her life.
None of these people is remotely likable or particularly interesting, and only Scott attempts to make his character in any way credible. Downey flounces around irritatingly, Shields does a lot of squawking, and the real-life rappers Toback has brought on board to play Rich's friends seem baffled by the director's free-form style, which requires everyone to come up with their own dialogue while the camera is rolling. Realizing viewers can only take so much bad improv before they tune out entirely, Toback throws in a few gratuitous sex scenes and a cameo appearance by a dazed Mike Tyson, who must fend off propositions from both Sam and Terry. "No one ever expressed to me that I was gorgeous or anything," Tyson blushes before turning down the offers.
Although he wrote a justifiably acclaimed script for Warren Beatty and Annette Bening's "Bugsy," Toback has never had much luck as a filmmaker. Perhaps you remember "The Pick-Up Artist," the movie that single-handedly killed Molly Ringwald's career? That was another Toback production. "Black and White," for all its arty pretensions and supposed shock value, doesn't break his losing streak. James Sanford
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