The Insulting John Q.

Denzel Washington has made it clear that he doesn't want to be regarded as a new Poitier. This isn't modesty or intrepidness. His choice of roles?since the time that he's been able to effect his own choices?is simply as far from the Poitier image of rectitude and conscious race representation as an ungrateful child of the 60s can get. Slapped by Gene Hackman in Crimson Tide, immobilzed and emasculated in The Bone Collector, impersonating the most nefarious police officer in movie history in Training Day and now portraying a renegade working-class father in John Q, Washington has rolled back Poitier's advances. Those roles suggest Washington is free of the burden of standing for something that Poitier always carried, but the fact is Washington stands for the opposite of Poitier's virtue as the representative black American male. Washington's popularizing of the stereotypical black male makes him a matinee idol for a lynch-mob culture. When Poitier receives his honorary Academy Award on March 24 and Washington likely wins one for Training Day, a torch won't be passed, it'll be snuffed out.

It might be giving Washington too much credit to accuse him of venal calculation. My interest here is in identifying the unconscious humiliation that is part of Washington's actions as a free-agent black pop artist. Despite his acclaim, Washington founders in a period when black celebrities, from sports to entertainment, lack a galvanizing social spirit. The irreducible wonder of Poitier's 50s-60s-70s sojourn is that an entire era's social struggle shone through his performances. His artistic choices?from the 1950 No Way Out to even 1977's unfortunate A Piece of the Action?were also unembarrassed political choices. Washington's refusal to appear "political" or to be a standard-bearer is based on a fallacy of our times. It's a specious contemporary notion to believe one's actions have no social repercussions, and the inanity of that thinking collides with shoddy filmmaking in John Q.

To a fool it may look like John Q heroizes Washington as a loving dad. Factory worker John Q. Archibald tests his society by holding an entire emergency room hostage when, for lack of medical insurance, the administrators at (False) Hope Memorial Hospital refuse his son an expensive heart transplant operation. Director Nick Cassavetes and screenwriter James Kearns attempt an Everyman story around the topic of universal health care, but Washington's casting turns this into a ruse. Being black, he can't help but signify social and political issues that the turgid storyline obviates. Thus the film's own gimmick?combining crime drama with humanist drama?backfires. To most people, John Q's desperate act will seem to be a stupid?and criminal?act. It is impossible for a black actor to enjoy "nontraditional" casting and play a role?even a Father Courage role?without summoning up political inference. It's dishonest for the filmmakers to deny this. As scholar Richard Dyer said in White, his great 1997 book of cultural criticism, "White people create the dominant images of the world and don't quite see that they thus construct the world in their image; white people set standards of humanity by which they are bound to succeed and others bound to fail." Dyer wasn't simply being provocative; he pointed out a cultural truth that John Q?and the bulk of Washington's filmography?strenuously tries to deny. Asking movie audiences to view the semi-documentary dramatization of a black man flouting the law with less prejudice than they would view a similar event on tv news is an attempt to escape reality.

Cassavetes, Kearns and Washington emphasize emotion?lots of tears and anger?over political credulity. They insult viewers by only allowing them to tsk-tsk John Q's medical insurance dilemma (a loony Stevie Wonder tune goes "Bo-bo-bo-bo-bo" under the meant-to-be-poignant scenes) and not contemplate the social inequity it is related to (Hard Copy door-slam sound effects are meant to increase tension). Providing John Q with white-ethnic neighbors is another ruse?it doesn't enlarge the issue, but mollifies it. Instead of exploring common family suffering?building real points of humane solidarity?the filmmakers concoct a contemporary version of the old beer commercial bonhomie by pandering first to interracial Little League games, then to John Q's hot-head, EveryDad reflexes. I challenge this as insincere and actually a lot less credible than the 2000 Remember the Titans, which at least offered a livelier big-screen beer commercial of brotherhood. Washington wasn't especially convincing in that role either (except for early scenes of the coach's arrogant indifference). That film got its effects simply through blunt Jerry Bruckheimer engineering. Washington tries energizing Cassavetes' mawkishness in John Q by once again imitating Samuel Jackson truculence. It's typical of Washington's narcissistic careerism that he tears a page out of Jackson's The Negotiator script instead of taking a page out of the newspaper and showing what often happens these days when a black man is confronted by police squads. Without acknowledging that dilemma (it is as pertinent as universal health care) the film's sentimentality insults social reality.

We need to learn from our movie past or else be condemned to garbage like John Q. Nothing reveals Hollywood's pathetic p.c. consciousness more than this grim opportunism?well, nothing since the ridiculous, placating Desperate Measures and Mad City. However, the major model for John Q is actually the 1975 Sidney Lumet-Al Pacino film Dog Day Afternoon. If '02 audiences are unfamiliar with Poitier, they're probably also ignorant of that landmark social drama. But Washington surely knows it and envies it, seeking another illogical acting showcase. Call this Thug Day Afternoon.

Coerced by his tear-springing wife (Kimberly Elise) to "Do something!" John Q's recklessness doesn't reflect a social milieu as was Lumet's New York specialty. This movie happens nowhere, full of fake, stock characters?from an effusive Latino mother and child, a black couple about to give birth, a lazy security guard, a comical jivey black dude, a young white punk and his abused girlfriend, platoons of keystone cops?to, of course, a sickeningly sweet little boy hooked up to IVs and hospital monitors. At one point the characters discuss HMOs ("There are 50 million people in this country without heath insurance. You want to change that? Write your congressman!") but it's all just background for Washington's apolitical grandstanding: "You are gonna give my son a new heart!"

EveryDad's moist monologue to his nearly comatose son is shameless. You can see past Washington's tears that he knows the last page of the script and is emoting for effect. This is far from Pacino's amazing Dog Day characterization that went deeper and deeper into misery, bewilderment, despondency, eventually reflecting his society's temperament?a classic, expanding performance, more impressive each time you see it. If you fantasize reading an artist's conviction in his selfless work, that occasion seems to confirm it. Pacino became a cultural hero when he agitated the crowds that gathered around him by shouting, "Attica! Attica!," invoking one of the political outrages of the day, but above all?surprisingly?venting the frustrations of the film's unempowered audience. Poitier never needed to be so blatant; his screen presence alone was provocative. But Washington would never?and has never?dared such provocation. When John Q rouses his spectators he shouts, "Sick! Help!" And it is sick. Help!

The final blow is John Q's advice to his son: "Make money even if you have to sell out." That's the true message of this post-Reagan, hiphop-era tearjerker. It reveals all that seems to motivate Washington and makes him, undeniably, the unPoitier.

Denzel will never suffer a repeat of that 1968 New York Times article that smeared Poitier when he was at the peak of his cultural effectiveness. (In one year, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and To Sir, with Love had made Poitier the number-one box office star in the world.) That's because Washington's image doesn't rankle the status quo. His career doesn't redefine how America views its inhabitants or itself. John Q's renegade celebrity enshrines the marginalization of black male potential and that in itself sums up Washington's own stardom. Maybe if Denzel filmed "the classics" (No Place to Be Somebody, A Raisin in the Sun, Blues for Mr. Charlie) he might break out of the tv habits he developed that make him a facile but not great actor. Maybe then he wouldn't seem so insincere. Poitier never did, and though he may have been a token 40 years ago, today those performances just look like the sleekest, most efficient post-Method movie acting. In future years, John Q. Washington will just look desperate.