Haggis: Playing With Fire and Not Getting Burned ...

Rating: 4/10 (12 May 2005)

All of the characters were underdeveloped as they served as willing pawns in this Maalox yarn. Jewish actor, Brendan Fraser affects a wonderful WASPy posture as a politically sensitive District Attorney. Yet he is ultimately forgettable. Sandra Bullock, as his wife, was one sexy >bleep
The film is littered with cheap devices used by the director to skirt real issues of racism. There is substantial emotional impact scattered about  but it uneven, sometimes heavy- handed, most times humorous. The only REAL racism is, interestingly, woven into the screenplay itself. All the missed cultural-cues and fragile, artificial dialogue amount to a parched-mouth mea culpa by the writer. There's your first dose of real irony.
For all the melodrama in the young street hood characters (played with skepticism by Larenz Tate and rap star Ludicrous) their dialogue obsequiously panders to white, racist expectations. Moreover, they were far too intellectual and self-analyzing of their predicament to be credible street people. The dialogue was callow and leading, as to camouflage the authors mal-informed dialectics.
Don Cheadle leads a motley crew of great actors who were obviously lead down a primrose path: Jewish actors Shaun Toub and Bahar Soomekh work in vein to hold the messy "Persian/ Arab" sub-story together. Far too complex to begin to comment on. But it was obviously a contrived element designed to capitalize on the current American/Anglo fascination and (fear of) with the Middle East.
With Daniel (Michael Pena) and his bulletproof daughter, I think the author is suggesting that racism (even) happens between minorities! (A classic, white rationalization stratagem) A Chinese wife of a draggled man calls a random white nurse a cow. Was the nurse a shill for the director's paean of white guilt? Does insulting white people punish them for being racists? Is 80s-style white self-punishment coming back in vogue? Ryan Philippe's character was laughable. After he accidentally kills his would-be black buddy he torches his car and starts a bonfire of the vanities. The ashes disperse and in a desperate nod to PT Anderson (a filmmaker with really strong talent), suddenly it's snowing in Los Angeles.
Matt Dillon's character got the greatest pass of the movie. He had the luxury of being a complete and overt racist. After he brazenly fondles a black woman, (Thandie Newton) humiliating her before her husband (a great acting effort, expended by the great Terrance Howard  but his character is ridiculously written); he gets to be the biggest hero as he pulls her from a burning SUV (a situation that could only possibly overlap in a small town like Mayberry). In this drippy, melodramatic scene Matt Dillon dives back into the exploding vehicle to save Ms. Newton's embattled character from certain death. The moment becomes strangely erotic. The same way I imagine Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemming were erotic  nothing like being raped by your oppressor! After about a hundred years or so, you might learn to actually like it
Is Mr. Haggis suggesting as Warren Beatty suggested in his 1994 farce, Bulworth: that racist whites can find redemption in mating with black people? Or is this the ultimate form of ethnic cleansing? It certainly was for hundreds of years during western European slavery. It is a compelling argument to state that we are currently smack-in-the-middle of the same racist regime! Our present time reality makes the surrealism of Alice in Wonderland pale by comparison. The fact that we can actually make entertainment products that decry our predicament is probably the secret that will make this film financially successful. Irony thick as blood.
In the future, after the dust has cleared from the fallout of our modern Babylon state, this movie will be seen as a propaganda film. Haggis is manipulating everyone. At first I was going to make an effort to seriously deconstruct the film but now I realize its just cultural manipulation, pure and simple. Haggis has taken a leadership position as he abrogates the effects of white racism. Indeed, racism as we understand it in America was fueled by European colonization and nothing other. It's an entirely fair indictment of our European forbearers. Indeed, fixing the blame does not have to constitute hating white people or any oppressor in the context of Tyranny. Modern "racism" as we know it today, is a mere orphan of race-tyranny.
Well, at least Mr. Haggis as sparked a conversation. But like the infamously popular academic text, The Bell Curve, over a decade ago -- which also sparked a national dialogue on race issues, albeit supported by soft-science on the academic front -- it is a dubious distinction of false merit. Paul haggis has confessed his racism to the world and he's getting paid handsomely for it. And that reality is the greatest irony of all.