The Weird and The Wacky Meet

Where YouBetIAm comes to write….

Lost Potential Comes to Dinner

Guess Who Takes Many Wrong Turns

                 Every movie starts out with the potential to be a great film.  Whether it’s a comedy, drama or some weird new category, there is still some possibility of saying something profound.  Unfortunately, some movies take a wrong turn just as they get past the idea stage, so they waste that potential.  Guess Who is one of those movies.

                 The movie follows a weekend visit home where Theresa, played by the charming and lovely Zoe Saldana, is bringing her fiancé Simon, a strangely subdued Ashton Kutcher, home for the first time.  Theresa has conveniently not told her parents (Bernie Mac and Judith Scott) that she will be marrying a white man.  Sitcom-esque fun and wackiness ensues.

                 The movie never really rises above the humor to talk about the issue of interracial romance.  Is it a big deal?  Probably not, but Guess Who never really answers the question.  The fact of the matter is that there is still racial tension forty years after the civil rights movement and the movie never really addresses this tension outside of one or two uncomfortable scenes that don’t even fit in with the rest.

                 Instead of tackling those thorny racial concerns, Guess Who goes the route of broad, over-the-top comedy.  To provide the comedic conflict, a misused Mac subjects us to absurd levels of homophobia and Christian prudishness regarding alcohol and sex, which conveniently subsides in time for the reconciliation at the end.  Frankly, these elements felt out of place in the movie, as they didn’t really seem to fit in with the main theme.  It’s as if it were brought in to provide some way to avoid touching the race issue.

                 The scenes with Mac in bed with Kutcher were played for laughs, but they still felt fake.  There was humor to be found in the subject matter, but the movie played it safe, targeting the laughs at the expense of groups that apparently still deserve it, like liberals and gays.

The only time the movie worked was when it was being real and making me uncomfortable, such as in one particular scene that stood out from the rest of the movie.  In it, the family was sitting around the dinner table, and Mac goaded Kutcher into telling a few of the racist jokes he had heard.  This scene felt like it came from a different, better movie.

I would have appreciated a more direct approach, especially given the movie’s genealogy.  Guess Who is a loose remake of the 1967 liberal classic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.   In 1967, interracial couples were a much bigger deal, and that movie confronted the issue in a real way, even though it did so with rose-colored glasses.  Still, in a lot of ways the remake is a disappointment to the original.

I think what bothered me the most is that it could have been great.  The filmmakers had an opportunity and it was completely squandered.  There may have been a few laughs, but nothing about the movie came from the heart, which is the only place that a successful relationship or romantic comedy could come from.

 

2 1/2 out of 5.

Copyright 2005

Kutcher And Mac Get Comfortably Uncomfortable

By Amanda Evans

Date: 04/14/05