Guess not

By Noel Vera

Kevin Rodney Sullivan's "Guess Who" enjoys possibly the biggest,
easiest head start for a remake in the history of cinema: it's a
reworking of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," Stanley Kramer's
terminally benign melodrama about a young woman who brings a black
man home to meet her parents. Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn
were the Hollywood royalty that originally played the beleaguered
parents, and Sidney Poitier the black "ubermensch" in love with
their precious daughter (can't recall the actress who plays the
daughter, except that she was such an out-of-it nonentity she didn't
seem worth remembering). It was a slow and obvious "comedy" (in
quotes because otherwise I'd be insulting the art form's good name),
so painfully earnest, so insufferably polite (the way Tracy
says "screw all those people!" sounds more like the utterance of an
endearing old fart) even at the time it came out people noted how
dated it was (not Academy voters, though--the picture still managed
to be nominated for a slew of Oscars). You only needed to watch
Norman Jewison's "In the Heat of the Night" made that same year to
know how much more cannily racism, even at the time, has been
treated: Poitier again played a superior black man (Detective Virgil
Tibbs), here investigating a small-town murder, but the movie really
belongs to Rod Steiger's Bill Gillespie--an unabashed, self-
satisfied police chief and bigot who despite himself manages to
transcend his prejudices, even use his familiarity with racist
attitudes to help Tibbs solve the case.

Sullivan's movie does make a few interesting changes to Kramer's
original, though turning the plot into a "white man visits black
future in-laws" story isn't one of them: you lose the electric
crackle that goes through the audience when the handsome black man
touches the beautiful white woman (in Manila even now, you can feel
the sense of outraged shock). In its place is a father's jealousy
writ larger (like "Father of the Bride," both original and remake,
or "Meet the Parents," both original and sequel, with the race card
thrown in), only the tingle isn't quite on the same level (may not
be politically correct to suggest this--that a black man with a
white woman is a bigger scandal to general society than a white man
with a black woman--but I'm making an observation, not giving an
opinion).

What the movie does get right is casting Bernie Mac in the Spencer
Tracy role, as patrician Percy Jones. Mac is an outsized comedian,
and he easily gives the role the kind of scale and energy needed to
keep the picture moving, if not actually bring it to life. Sullivan
and writers William Rose, David Ronn, Jay Scherick and Peter Tolan
fail to give Mac the kind of snappy lines he needs, but Mac somehow
soldiers forward anyway, bullying through the rather trite dialogue
with bluster and bluff. You can believe this man is possessive about
his daughter, that he'll do anything to protect her, even run a
clandestine credit check on her boyfriend. Mac's jealous father may
not go as far as Robert De Niro's retired FBI agent in grilling his
potential son-in-law (in the aforementioned "Meet the Parents"), but
Mac's distrust is somehow funnier, more expressive--beyond the
jealousy of a father towards his daughter, he manages to convey a
black man's outrage that some white man is poaching on what he
regards as his property. Heresy for me to suggest this, perhaps, but
I'd say Mac right now, even with the relatively short career he's
had so far, is a better, more energetic actor than Tracy ever was
(even if Mac has never worked with the likes of Kramer, George
Cukor, Vincente Minnelli, Fritz Lang).

It helps Mac's case that his daughter, played by Zoe Saldana, is
drop-dead beautiful, whether fresh-faced or in full makeup, and
anyone privileged enough to call himself her father would
understandably get the fantods at the thought that some man (worse,
some white "honky") is going to take her away; helps that she can
act, too, and gives her scenes with Mac or the others a grounded
sweetness, an emotional believability I found totally absent in
whoeverthatwas in the original production. It helps further that the
Mac has a gorgeous wife (Judith Scott) who, together with Saldana,
is enough of a force of nature to keep Mac in check (plus she is
hot, and dances a mean tango).

Ashton Kutcher as Simon Green plays the same goofy klutz he did
in "Just Married," and it's an agreeable enough schtick. Here, Mac
helps brings out Kutcher's best comic timing; (either that or
Kutcher has to work harder to keep from being blown off the screen
completely). As is, he fulfills his function, and doesn't seriously
harm the picture.

The movie is looser, funnier, and in its callow way more realistic
about what an encounter between a suitor and his extra-racial in-
laws might be like than the original picture--which isn't saying
much. What this lacks to become a really great comedy is the kind of
sharp observation and crack comic timing you might find in the
better recent race comedies, like Ron Shelton's "White Men Can't
Jump," or Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" (Lee might have been the
ideal choice to hit this idea out of the park); in fact as far back
as '67 you could find crisper, funnier, more pointed dialogue on
race and racial prejudice in any page of Stirling Silliphant's
script for "In the Heat of the Night" than in all of this one.
Perhaps the only time the movie really does justice to its topic is
in the dinner scene, where Jones goads Green into telling one black
joke too many; then the picture sinks back into standard-issue
sitcom humor (even throwing in a scene where Jones and Green bond
over the writing of wedding vows and a bottle of expensive vodka),
and rushes into the kind of climactic plot twist you could see
coming a mile off (Hint: it has to do with Green's job; I guessed it
ten minutes into the movie).

Which is about it, except Robert Curtis-Brown quietly steals the
movie as the metrosexual wedding planner (he gets the kind of laughs
Martin Short tried for in the execrable "Father of the Bride"
remakes, only with less effort), and Sullivan manages to give the
picture all the visual style and oomph of a TV show. Not too bad,
not too good, not really much of anything. And Mac should find
something that would really showcase his talents.

(First printed in Businessworld, 4/22/05)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)