MOVIE: BLACK OR WHITE – DISCRIMINATION
Black
or white is a 2014 American drama movie which is about a widowed man - Elliott
Anderson, who just lose his wife from the car accident. Elliott has to take
care of his granddaughter- Eloise and deals with his stressful after the death
of his wife. He has problem with Eloise’s father, who was considered as the
reason of Elliott’s daughter death. So when Eloise’s father and their family
come visit and want to take away of Eloise, Elliot refuses. The movie portrays
a picture of discrimination and how it effect a child who was born into biracial.
Sustained with the excellent performances
from a cast led by Kevin Costner and Octavia
Spencer, it tells a personal story loosely based on true events in Mr. Binder’s own family history. Its
characters, both black and white, want to transcend their differences and do
the right thing
The focal character, Elliott Anderson (Mr.
Costner), is a Santa Monica lawyer devastated by the death of his wife, Carol
(Jennifer Ehle, seen in gauzy flashbacks), from a car accident. They were
raising their biracial 7-year-old granddaughter, Eloise (Jillian Estell), whose
mother died at 17 while giving birth.
The movie portrays Elliot as a sweet and gentle grandfather, who combs
Eloise’s hair and drives her to an elite private school. Eloise’s black father,
Reggie is a drifter and crack addict alienated from his family. This back story
is parceled out very slowly. In another touched moment, Elliott hires Duvan, a
young, extremely polite, multilingual West African math tutor, for Eloise.
In a remarkably
vanity-free performance, Mr. Costner, 60, plays Elliott as a potbellied
alcoholic wreck with a bad dye job who doesn’t go anywhere without a drink in
his hand. Mr. Costner is entirely convincing as an angry drunk who in trying to
drown the pain of his loss only fuels his rage and despair.
Elliott is blindsided when Reggie’s
mother, Rowena Jeffers, with whom he has a warily cordial relationship, notices
his erratic behavior and decides to sue for custody of Eloise. She hires her
brother Jeremiah, a hotheaded lawyer who decides they should portray Elliott as
a closet racist prone to using offensive epithets.
Rowena, who operates several small
businesses, is the matriarch of a large extended family in the south Los
Angeles County city of Compton. The movie jumps between Santa Monica, where
Elliott lives in splendor with a full-time housekeeper, and Compton, where
Rowena’s extended family spills onto the front porch. Except for the absent
Reggie, the Jefferses are a happy, productive clan who play jazz together in
Rowena’s big, homey living room.
Ms. Spencer turns the strict, truth-telling Rowena into a mighty force. As
in “The Help,” her wide-eyed stare gives her the gravity of an all-seeing sage
who doesn’t miss a trick and is not afraid to speak her mind. Although Rowena
seldom sees Reggie, she hasn’t completely given up on him. Rowena may be a
clichéd Earth Mother, but Ms. Spencer imbues her with a fierce severity.
When Reggie shows up, professing to be
drug-free after years of addiction, Rowena and Jeremiah pressure him to join
the custody battle. Mr. Holland’s fragile, guilt-stricken Reggie is the
antithesis of a stereotypical street thug. Lacking the self-protective bravado
of a bad boy, he is afraid to meet Eloise, and terrified of testifying in
court.
The Compton shown in the movie isn’t the shoot-’em-up Wild West of gangsta
rap lore. There is no sound of gunfire or visible police presence. By making
the Jeffers household struggling but middle class, “Black or White” avoids
addressing the extremes of poverty that are a root cause of crime and drug
addiction. It wants to be a family drama, not a sociopolitical tract, and
carefully steers around political potholes.
The movie is so wary of alienating audiences that only at the very end does
it explode into violence. That blowup is a contrived, unsatisfying
confrontation between Elliott and Reggie that is calculated to be releasing.
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