The rage they feel for what life has dealt them transmutes through the alchemy of a system built on denying that anger into rage at other, smaller things: other convicts, the food, finally each other. ![]() Both Murphy and Lawrence are great ranters, and Demme is wise enough to sit back and watch them work and let us enjoy the bubbling of their chemistry. But this of course gets them where the movie wants them and frees them for its deepest pleasure, which might be called the power of the rant. So they go from free men to lifers in the blink of an eye without doing much to prevent it. ![]() Then they think the white sheriff will help them straighten out the mixup they've gotten into regarding that now-dead gambler. ![]() They think they'll get an honest game of poker in a honky-tonk saloon from a gambler named Winston who smokes cigars. Does this sound possible? Would African Americans of 1932, whose grandparents would have been slaves, somehow not get it? But they waltz into a whites-only diner and are stunned when they are refused service (though it is a hilarious scene, especially when Claude says, "All right, then, if I can't have white pie, can I have some Negro pie?"). The two get in big bad trouble fast in Mississippi because neither of them seems quite to get what's going on in the Jim Crow South. So it's to the South they go, but this is also the moment the film first displays its chronically slipshod tendencies. (The reason: Ray has picked his pocket.) Spanky gives them a choice: Go south to pick up a booze shipment, or go swimming with the help of 30 yards of tightly wound rope. Ray (Murphy) is the hustler con man, pickpocket, bootlegger, thief who in the Harlem high renaissance of 1932 runs afoul of nightclub owner Spanky Johnson on the same night that good-soldier workingman Claude (Lawrence) loses his money and can't pay his bill. They don't let this is their triumph, and the movie's signal accomplishment a monstrous system turn them into monsters. They remain committed to their ideal of freedom and to each other though they have a spat and don't talk for 10 years and they try this thing and that. It has a strain of nobility to it: Claude and Ray never give up. In that sense it is of a piece with other African American odysseys of survival over the long haul, through the thick and thin of an ugly history, like "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" or "Driving Miss Daisy." John Singleton would use it as a grenade.īut this director, Ted Demme, turns Murphy's own original story, in its best aspect, into an essay on endurance and dignity. ![]() Two innocent black men, railroaded into a brutal penal farm system, tormented not merely by the bulls, the heat, the savagery of the place, but also by what could have been theirs and never was? Spike Lee would turn it into a napalm strike on the body politic. Yet the movie is surprisingly free of rancor and hatred. And they find it's a road that goes nowhere very slowly, as the movie chronicles their 60 years behind the gun line. 8 of the Mississippi State Prison archipelago, a Devil's Island in the Delta where the two are consigned in 1932 after a casual frame-up by a racist lawman. "Life," the new Eddie Murphy-Martin Lawrence film, feels as if it's inspired by the old "Road" comedies of Crosby and Hope. Eddie Murphy, right, and Martin Lawrence are in it for the long haul in "Life."
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |