A Tenth Anniversary Re-Post: January, 2009
Practically everybody in print has been finding a way to speak to the great historical occasion of our 44th President's inauguration, and I was particularly taken with Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott's take in the NY Times: How the Movies Made the President. Subtitled "Evolving Cinematic Roles Have Prepared America to Have a Black Man in Charge," their piece insightfully analyzes just how that's been accomplished, shrewdly identifying the movie archetypes that have arguably paved Obama's way, among them the Black Everyman, the Black Father, even the Black Yoda (think Morgan Freeman).
There was only one role missing from the list, through no fault of Ms. Dargis and Mr. Scott: the lover, the romantic -- call him the Black Mr. Right. And you might as well call him the Black Blank Space, for as much screen time as the guy's gotten, so far.
Where is The Great African-American Romantic Comedy? I've found myself wondering, or even the best of the near-greats? When I went looking for a Top 10 Black Romantic Comedies, I emerged from an afternoon in cyberspace more perplexed and vexed than victorious. Obligatory disclaimer aside (not being black, I'm not the most qualified, etc.) I could only settle on a rough half dozen or so clearly top-notch American movies that feature black men and women in funny love. Which makes a rom-com lover wonder.
Maybe it's the last frontier of this territory. Are we still so not past the culture's racial divide, that the predominant white audience hasn't yet begun to accept a Black Mr. Right, let alone one who wins a Black Dream Ms.? Box office stats are disheartening in this regard, suggesting a self-fulfilling cycle: if such pics aren't pulling in a sizable audience, the studios are less likely to make them.
Ironically, movie biz history's number one best opening weekend for a romantic comedy is Will Smith's Hitch, which surely tops my incomplete Top 10. But even here, Smith's romantic foil wasn't African-American: Cuban-American Eva Mendes is the woman of color who kicks his butt, then claims it in the end. In this sense, how far have we come since the dated-in-its time Sydney Poitier hit, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
Meanwhile, some of comedy's best black minds have found the romantic comedy genre challenging. Witness Chris Rock's admirably adventurous but nevertheless box office tank-erous I Think I Love My Wife. Interestingly, half of my thumbnail "top six or seven" rom-coms starring black leads come via Eddie Murphy and co. -- but two out of three (Coming to America and The Nutty Professor) are high concept comedy hybrids that wouldn't immediately register as traditional romantic comedies, leaving only Boomerang as a straight-up genre pic.
What about screen chemistry? Halle Berry ought to be all over this turf by now (though my money's still on Gabrielle Union as the genre go-t0 girl). You'd think Denzel's reign as the black Cary Grant would already be upon us, but having largely struck to romantic dramas (and an oddly neutered turn with Whitney Houston in The Preacher's Wife), he's yet to follow Philadelphia with his equivalent of The Philadelphia Story.
The how-come? of it all is definitely subject for further research. Meanwhile Denzel did make my short list of The Good Ones, with his stint opposite Indian-English Sarita Choudhury in Mira Nair's
Mississippi Masala. Spike Lee's on the list, though he himself has
mostly disowned the rough but remarkable
She's Gotta Have It. I'd put it alongside his cousin Malcolm Lee's
The Best Man (a rom-com dynasty?)
But after that, we're in a runners-up zone, where only
Love Jones and
Love and Basketball would make the cut, while such snarky farces as
Two Can Play This Game and
Deliver Us From Eva may not stand the test of time.
Given its untapped possibilities, the Black Romantic Comedy looks to me like prime screenwriting real estate, here at the end of the Oughts. If there ever was a neat high concept romantic comedy, it's "black first family moving into the White House" -- a movie that would introduce us to two marvelous, sophisticated and still amusingly romantic newbies knocking around our nation's most famous home. But mercifully, real life has beaten Hollywood to it first.
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