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‘Black or White’ Has A Retro Feel
By Sandra Olmsted
Writer/director Mike Binder’s Black or White, an absorbing look at race in America, opens with successful California attorney Elliot Anderson (Kevin Costner) in the hallway of a hospital with flowers and balloons for his wife, who has died in a car accident. Having lost their only daughter when she was a teenager and now his wife, he has only his 7-year-old mixed-race granddaughter, Eloise (newcomer Jillian Estell) left to love and care for.
Unfortunately, he takes to drinking away his grief and hallucinating interactions with his dead wife (Jennifer Ehle).
Trying to be the guardian and parent to is clearly too much for Elliot right now, but Eloise’s paternal grandmother, Rowena (Octavia Spencer) is only offering a custody battle instead of help. Because she is concerned that Eloise needs more family and support than just Elliot and that Eloise needs to learn about her African American heritage, Rowena enlists her nephew Jeremiah (Anthony Mackie), who is also a high-powered lawyer, to seek custody of Eloise. When Eloise’s father, Reggie reappears at Rowena’s Compton Heights home, he seems to be sober and on the right path, and Rowena plans to capitalize on his presence and Elliot’s drinking and possible racism, if Jeremiah can prove it.
Although Elliot’s wife and Rowena had worked out a shared arrangement, Elliot wasn’t in on the deal and doesn’t exactly get along with Rowena because he’s angry about her son’s culpability in the loss of his own daughter. Eloise’s mother died in childbirth because she had a heart condition and was estranged from her parents and medical history by Eloise’s father, Reggie (Andre Holland), who has spend more time in jail and on drugs than in Eloise’s life.
As his drinking gets more out of control and the threat of loosing Eloise greater, Elliot hires Duvan (Mpho Koaho), an African who escape when his entire village and family were massacred, to tutor Eloise and to drive now constantly drunken Elliot around. Duvan provides comic relief and offers Elliot lots of sage wisdom for one so young, but he also is the character which toes the line of a stereotype more than any other character in Binder’s film.
Binder both uses and defies stereotypes in Black or White, and sometimes it works and sometimes it grates on politically correct nerves. However, that also seems to be the intention—to examine what these characters know and think about each other and what is true and what isn’t as simple as it seems.
It’s a powerful theme wrapped in a film that is structured like a Golden Age movie of 1930s or 40s. The feel of the film is similar to any number of films of this era which addressed social and political issues of that time in the tidy milieu of a family-friendly drama.
Although the film drops the N-word, the startling way that it is used should raise discussion among viewers. Kevin Costner, who appeared in St. Louis on a publicity tour last month, explained that he partially funded the film because he believed in its message. He also is clearly the star and main character in the film.
Costner delivers a marvelous performance as Elliot. Spencer, Estell, Koaho, Holland, and Paula Newsome, as the judge in the custody battle, also give great performances but get less time on camera. A Relativity Media release, Black or White is rated PG-13 on appeal for brief strong language, thematic material involving drug use and drinking, and for a fight and runs 121 minutes. Black or White is in theaters now.
