A movie that knows whats good for you and tells you repeatedly

Rating: 5/10 (7 August 2005)

This isn't going to be a review as such, rather just my feelings towards this film. This will probably help no one, but I feel I have to say something so I can move on to other, better films.
I can't deny that this movie is well made. It looks good, its well acted (even if Sandra Bullock is too much of a personality and stands out too much), and its one of the rare Hollywood movies out today that has a point of view. But for all the pluses I can't say I like the film or even admire it on anything other than a technical level. I don't like being preached to. I don't like how it feels so carefully constructed and artfully put together that it seems more like a sermon rather than a movie. Sure its premise, simply put, that racism affects us all, and that some can over come it is true, but by the end of the movie I was left feeling unmoved and asking the screen "yes, and?" The film seems to be trying to take a high ground and say that it knows better than all of us. Somehow I don't think so.
This movie made me feel the same way that a play called Spinning into Butter made me feel. Spinning into Butter is by Rebecca Gilman and is in the process of being made into a movie. The play deals with racism on a small New England college campus. The center piece of the play is what is essentially a 20 minute monologue that boils racism down so narrowly that it ends up says that if you don't sit next to a person of a different race on a train/subway car, even if its completely empty except for the two of you then you are a racist. Many in the audience were moved by this. And equal number of the audience were left shaking our heads in disbelief since the play essentially says all acts are racial acts. I left the play, as I left the theater showing this movie admiring that they got so much right, but feeling that at the point at which they got on the soap box they lost me and I was never able to fully accept their premise.
As well made and on target as the film is, its derailed by the film makers need to climb onto that soap box. I'm left not wanting to ponder the points out for myself, rather I want desperately to ask them "yes, and your point was what?". Actually my feeling is more a happiness that now that I've seen it, I never have to see it again.