Is ‘Race’ as a Source of All Societal Problems Losing its Power? Two movies suggests this could be the case
There is no better time for African Americans starring in movies than it is right now; and this is especially so for Don Cheadle.
Best known for winning an Oscar for Hotel Rawanda where he portrayed a man who risked his life to save people in the Rawanda Genocide, Cheadle is comfortably entrenched in the Hollywood mainstream. His most enduring gift is the ability to go from button-down-suit-and-tie everyman to in-your-face-street-stud without missing a beat. He evokes imagery of Samuel Jackson (think: Pulp Fiction) or rap artist Ice Cube (think: Higher Education), but also early Sidney Poitier (think: Raisin in the Sun) and Harry Belafonte (think: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil).
Nowhere is this most clearly presented than in two recently released Columbia House DVDs. Talk to Me is Cheadle’s portrayal of the turbulent life of controversial Washington, D.C. DJ, Petey Green, who was a shock jock before the word was fashionable. And Reign Over Me is where Cheadle co-stars with Adam Sandler playing the role of long time friend to Sandler’s character who lost his family during the 9/11 terrorists attacks on the World Trade Center.
What makes Cheadle’s performance so noticeable—and so culturally important—are the atypical portrayals of African American men that he delivers. These films convey evidence that we may, in fact, be in the best of times for African Americans starring in films; certainly some of the best of times for films starring Don Cheadle.
In Talk to Me Cheadle, who is co-starred with Chiwetel Ejiofor, plays an ex-convict who has a gift for gab and mixing insightful commentary with the thumping sounds of rhythm and blues hits of the day. But from the very beginning it is clear that both Cheadle’s character and Ejiofor’s character (Ejiofor plays Dewey Hughes who eventually will come to be one of the first blacks to own a radio media conglomerate) are playing out a much larger and more timeless role: that of the duality of the Black man. Cheadle’s character is the foul mouthed, womanizing, unrepentant street soldier and Ejiofor is the antithesis: as Petey Green's boss at the radio station, he is the college graduate, moving-on-up educated brother looking for his opportunity to make it big.
Yet….
Cheadle’s character is deeply insecure and is way more mouth than he is confident in himself. And Ejiofor’s character has been deeply scarred by a poverty stricken upbringing to the extent that it makes him manipulative of his own people and myopic when it comes to seeing the true damage that racism has done to them.
In the end, Talk to Me becomes just as much of a thesis on the dichotomy of the Black man and his eternal struggle to build a synthesis from 400 years of oppression as it is a compelling movie that’s filled with memorable music and moments.
You will not find these sorts of existential happenings in Reign Over Me, however.
Cheadle’s character, that of a successful dentist whose wife is portrayed by Jada Pinkett Smith, is actually subordinate to Sandler’s character. And there is no hint of the street in his character, nor are there overt themes of social consciousness in crisis. Rather, Cheadle’s character is convincingly played as a man of whom race is more background noise than anything else. He struggles with finding deeper value and meaning in his life as he holds tightly to a wife and family that he loves. He is trying to figure out how to make it all work, and to eke out some degree of happiness from it all. And it is Sandler’s deeply flawed character, a victim of post-traumatic stress from having lost his family in the horrors of 9/11, that help Cheadle’s character put those pieces together.
In this sense, Cheadle manages to make race a non-issue by convincingly communicating the universality of the search for happiness. It is also left profoundly unspoken that higher education (his character being a professional person) is conducive for negating the inertia that race can create for the Black man.
What we see suggested in the themes of these movies is that there are subtle shifts beginning to emerge in the culture. It is not that race is no longer a problem—clearly it is—but that race is losing its power to be the entire problem. Talk to Me and Reign Over Me—movies starring an African American who is not “being Black” for the sake of exploitation--are movies with a conscience. That is a sign of progress; that is a sign of maturity. To the extent this reflects the reality of what could be happening in the larger society…so much the better.
Best known for winning an Oscar for Hotel Rawanda where he portrayed a man who risked his life to save people in the Rawanda Genocide, Cheadle is comfortably entrenched in the Hollywood mainstream. His most enduring gift is the ability to go from button-down-suit-and-tie everyman to in-your-face-street-stud without missing a beat. He evokes imagery of Samuel Jackson (think: Pulp Fiction) or rap artist Ice Cube (think: Higher Education), but also early Sidney Poitier (think: Raisin in the Sun) and Harry Belafonte (think: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil).
Nowhere is this most clearly presented than in two recently released Columbia House DVDs. Talk to Me is Cheadle’s portrayal of the turbulent life of controversial Washington, D.C. DJ, Petey Green, who was a shock jock before the word was fashionable. And Reign Over Me is where Cheadle co-stars with Adam Sandler playing the role of long time friend to Sandler’s character who lost his family during the 9/11 terrorists attacks on the World Trade Center.
What makes Cheadle’s performance so noticeable—and so culturally important—are the atypical portrayals of African American men that he delivers. These films convey evidence that we may, in fact, be in the best of times for African Americans starring in films; certainly some of the best of times for films starring Don Cheadle.
In Talk to Me Cheadle, who is co-starred with Chiwetel Ejiofor, plays an ex-convict who has a gift for gab and mixing insightful commentary with the thumping sounds of rhythm and blues hits of the day. But from the very beginning it is clear that both Cheadle’s character and Ejiofor’s character (Ejiofor plays Dewey Hughes who eventually will come to be one of the first blacks to own a radio media conglomerate) are playing out a much larger and more timeless role: that of the duality of the Black man. Cheadle’s character is the foul mouthed, womanizing, unrepentant street soldier and Ejiofor is the antithesis: as Petey Green's boss at the radio station, he is the college graduate, moving-on-up educated brother looking for his opportunity to make it big.
Yet….
Cheadle’s character is deeply insecure and is way more mouth than he is confident in himself. And Ejiofor’s character has been deeply scarred by a poverty stricken upbringing to the extent that it makes him manipulative of his own people and myopic when it comes to seeing the true damage that racism has done to them.
In the end, Talk to Me becomes just as much of a thesis on the dichotomy of the Black man and his eternal struggle to build a synthesis from 400 years of oppression as it is a compelling movie that’s filled with memorable music and moments.
You will not find these sorts of existential happenings in Reign Over Me, however.
Cheadle’s character, that of a successful dentist whose wife is portrayed by Jada Pinkett Smith, is actually subordinate to Sandler’s character. And there is no hint of the street in his character, nor are there overt themes of social consciousness in crisis. Rather, Cheadle’s character is convincingly played as a man of whom race is more background noise than anything else. He struggles with finding deeper value and meaning in his life as he holds tightly to a wife and family that he loves. He is trying to figure out how to make it all work, and to eke out some degree of happiness from it all. And it is Sandler’s deeply flawed character, a victim of post-traumatic stress from having lost his family in the horrors of 9/11, that help Cheadle’s character put those pieces together.
In this sense, Cheadle manages to make race a non-issue by convincingly communicating the universality of the search for happiness. It is also left profoundly unspoken that higher education (his character being a professional person) is conducive for negating the inertia that race can create for the Black man.
What we see suggested in the themes of these movies is that there are subtle shifts beginning to emerge in the culture. It is not that race is no longer a problem—clearly it is—but that race is losing its power to be the entire problem. Talk to Me and Reign Over Me—movies starring an African American who is not “being Black” for the sake of exploitation--are movies with a conscience. That is a sign of progress; that is a sign of maturity. To the extent this reflects the reality of what could be happening in the larger society…so much the better.
posted by Robert McTyre Sr. at 1:35 PM
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