Antwone Fisher

No matter how many times you read the title Antwone Fisher, it looks like a misspelling. In actuality, this Ebonics melodrama is the result of very deliberate calculation. Based on the life of a real person (who in fact wrote the autobiographical screenplay), Antwone Fisher plays like the hoariest therapeutic fairytale.

Fisher contrives his life story to be inspirational. A black youth (played by Derek Luke) from Cleveland’s ghetto takes his bad attitude to the Navy where, after undergoing counseling for fighting, he seeks out the woman who gave birth to him in prison, then abandoned him to foster-home hell. Here’s the fairytale part: The armed forces saves his life through the encouragement of a military psychiatrist (Denzel Washington). A pretty girl chases him to bed. He discovers the blood relations he never knew. His first screenplay gets produced by a major Hollywood studio. All that makes Antwone Fisher the damndest resume movie since The Killing Fields, which summarized the genocidal hell Sidney Schanberg went through to get Cambodian Dith Pranh a job at The New York Times.

A little sarcasm is in order since many people are taking Antwone Fisher to heart so uncritically. The film is a tearjerker in the worst sense; pushing and shoving a viewer into mellowness. Unfortunately, not one unexpected emotion is revealed. Young Antwone suffers very familiar—or very grotesque—forms of abuse before being rewarded with a supersized serving of Feel Good. The audience responds to his life story vicariously, accepting the saga of privation, brutality, vengeance and relief as a placebo for real-life social and spiritual ills. To me this ought to inspire derision rather than gratitude because it’s the lowest form of pop manipulation. Neophyte Fisher and veteran Washington (who should know better) exploit contemporary black male suffering by conflating a maudlin approach with a helpful one.

Washington would be more forthright had he renamed his directorial debut Ordinary Good Will People Hunting. Antwone Fisher is full of the same Actors’ sentimentality as in Robert Redford’s Ordinary People and Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Good Will Hunting. Each of these films display actors’ love of psychodrama, finding key dramatic moments in scenes of therapeutic analysis where the stressed protagonist can act out his problems, just like in acting class. Audiences don’t need to think or confront politics to get the point; in fact, politics is denied when Antwone’s racial paranoia (beating up a friendly white sailor) is pushed aside as irrelevant. His real problem, Washington implies, is the ache in his heart. Contrast this mawkish view to the real-world harshness Jay-Z raps about in the song "Diamond Is Forever" ("I was out there selling hope so this fear would stop here"). Wary of the cruel world, Jay-Z describes illegally pandering to the unfortunate taste for placebo. In Hollywood, the drug is sentimentality; it makes liberals feel noble.

Because viewers—and white viewers in particular—can exercise a surfeit of pity at Antwone Fisher (including self-pity since white Americans also feel deprived and abused), the movie might be mistaken for bridging the gap between classes and races. But what passes for catharsis in Antwone Fisher—the psychiatrist assuring the patient "It’s not your fault"—is only a temporary salve.

Antwone Fisher’s high media profile is illusory. Better, recent films like Paid in Full and Drumline offer black characters caught up in modern circumstances that any sensitive viewer can relate to, but those more challenging films faced the racist barrier of inadequate publicity and marginal stars. Despite Washington’s box-office pull he has rarely pulled his audience toward enlightenment. His direction in Antwone Fisher is like his acting: suspect and calculated. With an assist no doubt from coproducer Randa Haines (Children of a Lesser God), the film’s opening scene and climactic reunion draw on domesticity to appeal to Washington’s female fan base. And Antwone’s dating scenes with cadet Cheryl (Joy Bryant), intended to show him restored to the world of civilized human relations, are pure romantic sweetness—the kind nobody believes anymore. Perhaps people want to believe it, but such wish fulfillment has no business in a movie that purports to solve the self-esteem issues of young black men.

It’s offensive to see Washington briefly evoke slavery in a banquet sequence, present a W.E.B. Du Bois book to Antwone, recite a bromide explaining the derogatory use of the word "nigga" and then offer Antwone’s insipid creative writing (a poem asking "Who will cry for the boy inside?") as if that explained it all. Simply making people cry over a crisis is insulting. So is dividing the film’s female characters into stereotypes of forgiveness and monstrousness. Most of Antwone’s suffering comes from the hands of three black be-aatches (played by Novella Nelson, Yolonda Ross with Viola Davis as the errant mother). When filmmakers resort to cliche manipulation, the use of misogyny isn’t far behind racist stereotypes.

Here’s why Antwone Fisher is not a breakthrough: There was no greater cultural tragedy in the past decade than the public and media disregard of Amistad and Beloved—two of the most artful movies ever made in this country, each dealing in fresh, intelligent ways with American racial history. Watching those films clarified one’s view of the moral and political legacy of slavery that still affects how America operates today and the way descendants of slaves manage their lives. Slavery’s lingering but obscured influence was vivified in Amistad by the actors’ embodiment of desire and justice and by the large-scale exhibition of neurotic and spiritual need that the actors in Beloved raised to exquisite, deeply emotional heights. (Whether it was John Adams’ obligation to his father’s ideals or Sethe’s profligate compulsion, Americans’ ongoing moral dilemmas were more beautifully illuminated in those movies than in any dozen contemporary sociological studies.)

It’s not far-fetched to think that Americans would have benefited from attending those films—either learning something basic or gaining edification. Both movies were preferable to hits like Training Day, 8 Mile and Changing Lanes, which only exacerbate social distress by soliciting crude reflex responses. I think social progress was hindered by the "failure" of those movies. (So was esthetic progress; the lighting of black skin tones in Antwone Fisher takes us back to the low-grade days of blaxploitation. Washington must have dared the great Philippe Rousselot to hide his mastery.)

Not even the decline of hiphop was as deleterious as Amistad and Beloved being denied their social effect (though hiphop’s billion-dollar degradation may have contributed to the social attitude that hardened people to those movies). Lately, it’s become profitable for popular culture to misrepresent the social crises related to race. Actors like Washington and Samuel L. Jackson, directors like the Hughes brothers and Spike Lee would have no careers without this aberration. Antwone Fisher is less hysterical than Menace II Society or Jungle Fever but it’s as phony as either of them. Washington has made a tearjerker without a sense of social reform. Moviegoers will understand more about the plight of African-Americans by watching Nicholas Nickleby. Charles Dickens knew what a vainglorious actor does not: when it comes to systemic deprivation, tears are not enough.

Jennifer Lopez’s Maid in Manhattan is similarly deceitful. It trades a benevolent fairytale for a realistic understanding of class and race. Playing a Puerto Rican hotel maid who falls in love with a white politician (Ralph Fiennes), J-Lo promotes class advancement while condescending to those who don’t. Like Antwone Fisher, this Hollywood sap ignores the difficulty (and nobility) of just surviving. It’s a betrayal. J-Lo tells her screen mother (Priscilla Lopez of Center Stage), "It burns you up that I have a right to go out with him." But her right is never an issue (at least not in the Bronx); J-Lo is simply justifying her own determination to cross over.

In the 1987 Maid to Order, Ally Sheedy’s housework profession respected the labor of women who weren’t social climbers. But director Wayne Wang directs J-Lo’s stuck-up fairytale blandly, adding no ethnic point of view. This is the worst kind of Americanism; it denies ethnic honor but celebrates marrying wealth. The soundtrack, combining "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" with "I’m Coming Out," is insincere, a vulgarization of pop’s democratic principle. If J-Lo ever made a movie that expressed the sass and boriqua pride she pretends in her music videos, she might become the major star she wants to be.