I wasn’t in as much of a hurry to see “Black or White” by
Mike Binder, until yesterday (at Angelika Mosaic, before a fair weekday
afternoon audience) as it sounded politically correct and stereotyped; and it
seemed to be released well after the Academy Awards season. There’s a different between stagy films like
this and historical films (“Selma”, Dec. 25) that really get into the
historical issues.
The story puts Kevin Costner as a 60-ish corporate lawyer
Elliot Anderson in LA, widowed by a car crash.
But he and his wife had been raising mixed-raced granddaughter Eloise
(Jillian Estel), since the girl’s black father Reggie (Andrew Holland) had disappeared into a
life of crime. As a single dad, Elliot
quickly learns to be attentive. But soon
the girl’s maternal grandmother (Octavia Spencer), who owns several retail
businesses in East LA is pursuing him for custody. She also runs a website that the film could have told us more about.
Much of the plot concerns Reggie’s pretense of having reformed,
but also his equivocal “blackmailing” Elliot to go away. In the courtroom hearing, I found the race
card to be played in a rather artificial way.
Then the movie has a climax, when Reggie tries to take the child by
force from Elliot’s home but has a sort of epiphany, which seems artificial.
The most interesting character may be Duvan (Mpho Kaoho),
the 19-year-old tutor whom Elliot hires, He has a published academic paper to
show off on everything, and speaks nine languages (some of them central African
and not Indo-European or easy to learn).
He’s a little bit like the college student Sal in my novel “Angel’s
Brother”.
The official site is here (Relativity Media).
Picture: Distant view of Mono Lake, my trip, 2012.
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