Black and White

dir. James Toback

R, 100 min.

Now showing at area theaters

James Toback desperately wants to be a controversial filmmaker. His strategy in his last two major releases has been to mine his sexual fantasies for onscreen material: His 1987 film The Pick-Up Artist, ostensibly a comedy, dealt with Toback’s own reputed history as a compulsive womanizer (hilariously documented in a Spy magazine article around that time). After a brief foray into documentary filmmaking (The Big Bang), Toback returned to the infinite and intimate diversity of sexual triangles in Two Girls and a Guy, a claustrophobic and somewhat sensationalistic exploration of the confused male ego.

So although his latest film Black and White takes as its theme white America’s fascination with gangsta slang and style, it’s not surprising that the opening scene involves a graphic interracial three-way up against a tree in Central Park. For Toback, that’s the very definition of pushing the envelope, and that’s what his movies are all about—showing what’s never been shown, talking about what isn’t talked about. Black and White demonstrates the existence of a real problem in the imitate-or-isolate strategies white people use to alleviate their discomfort with African American culture, the alien in their midst. But the movie isn’t about that problem: It’s about Toback congratulating himself for making a movie about it. His overbearing authorial presence makes Black and White fascinating and revealing, if for mostly the wrong reasons.

There’s always been an element of masochism along with the self-aggrandizement in Toback’s work. Robert Downey Jr. has been Toback’s screen surrogate twice now, and he usually portrays a self-delusional, tortured, emotionally stunted man. No exception here, as Downey plays a gay man married to independent filmmaker Brooke Shields, despite a very public identity crisis. Shields’ character is making a documentary about upper-class white kids who adopt hip-hop language, clothes, and cultural trappings, and chief among her subjects is Charlie (Bijou Phillips), the rebellious daughter of an investment banker. The slumming rich kids hang out at the luxurious pad of Rich Bower (Power from the Wu-Tang Clan), a local turf lord with a rapper (Raekwon) to promote. Rich’s childhood friend is Dean (Allan Houston), a college basketball star who throws a game for a gambler (Ben Stiller). The ensemble also includes Elijah Wood, Joe Pantoliano, Claudia Schiffer, Gaby Hoffmann, and Jared Leto, and that’s not counting the many celebrity cameos.

One of those cameos is by Toback himself, playing Arnie Tishman, the owner of a recording studio who balks at dealing with blacks until they show up with a white representative. An important requirement in controversial filmmaking, Toback feels, is that the filmmaker show that he is examining himself, that he recognizes his own implication in this Web of injustice and exploitative power relationships. The director parades this personal guilt so proudly that one suspects his self-flagellation is a primary reason for making the film. Any elements of character and plot that don’t wield the lash of the new white man’s burden are cursory and underdeveloped.

If it weren’t for the skill of some of the actors, on whom Toback depended to improvise scenes based on vague suggestions, whole subplots of Black and White would be so clichéd and contrived as to be unwatchable. As it is, the various strands of plot are clumsily connected by the amateurish device of having characters ask, ”Did you hear what happened to Dean [over in subplot 3A]?,“ followed by much head-shaking and commiseration.

Even though Toback clearly means to break taboos in Black and White, he organizes his African American characters along the same stereotypes he’s supposedly shattering: the insatiable stud, the gangbanger—the figures who fuel his own R&B-driven hipster fantasies. Non-stereotypical black characters, such as Dean, are treated as honorary white folks, culturally bilingual and therefore uninteresting in Toback’s polarized world. Despite the director’s supposed brinkmanship, he’s curiously timid about why the white kids worship thug life: For all the interracial sex on display, there’s never a scene in which the girls or guys get to talk about what attracts them. Attempting to find out what’s really going on might cut too close to home; better just to ask the question and leave it provocatively unanswered.

At the same time, Toback’s efforts to be cutting edge and au courant beg for psychoanalysis. Although his choice of topics seems to be changing, he’s clearly stuck in the same old obsessions that have driven him since 1978’s Fingers—the story of concert pianist Harvey Keitel’s obsession with Staggerlee stud Jim Brown. Even Rich Bower’s minimalist apartment, the set on which the various character groups meet and mingle, bears an uncanny resemblance to Robert Downey Jr.’s place in Two Girls and a Guy. Multileveled, divided by Japanese screens, overlooked by a loft bedroom—if it isn’t the same physical space, it’s without doubt the same psychological space.

Toback’s aggressive display of freedom from convention and filmmaking taboos is belied by the claustrophobic, repetitive familiarity of characters, incident, and setting. Every character in the film—well, every white character—can be read as a representative of some fragment of the director’s personality. At one point, fellow director Brett Ratner (Rush Hour), playing himself, shows up to mastermind the rapper’s video. Toback makes a halfhearted stab at criticizing Ratner for exploiting black talent, but he obviously wants to be Ratner too, with the hit movie and the Hollywood connections.

Despite Toback’s attempt to have the loose ends woven together by violence (à la Nashville, which the director emulates in form if not in style), none of the disparate stories in the film really speaks to any other. Tense meetings between black and white, rich and poor, ambitious and slumming take place, but it’s not surprising that nothing really happens. The inhabitants of these various cultural groups are not speaking the same language, so no communication or reconciliation is possible. It would have been interesting if Toback had picked up on that fact, but he doesn’t want to suggest any root causes for the problem he illustrates, just as he doesn’t want to propose any solutions.

Black and White is an important film despite its failure. It shows, as clearly as any film ever has, white America’s attempts to grapple with the erosion of its once-unchallenged entitlement, thanks to the emergence of a foreign culture now competitive in the marketplace of ideas. The ascendancy of hip-hop has spawned reactions ranging from xenophobia to ”going native.“ Toback may be pointing to what he thinks is the controversial issue—why white people want to be black—but his own obsessive agendas about race and sex tell the real story. For a frightened, guilty man, what’s significant is what he avoids saying. And both the problem and its possible solutions lie in that unexplored, pregnant void.