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Bringing Down The House

Movie Bringing Down The House Director Adam Shankman Producer Ashok Amritraj Cast Steve Martin. Queen Latifah, Eugene Levy, Joan Plowright

By Subhash K Jha

One of the film’s funniest phases when the big African-American woman teaches her anglo-saxon male host how to be a stallion-lover, has been snipped off by our party-pooping censorboard. Really, we can’t have men and women exchanging sex talk so openly in a ‘family film’. What would our children say? Not that this film allows anyone to say anything much about it. Before we can express exasperation over the sheer mediocrity of the plot, it whisks us off into a domain of satire-driven characters. Steve Martin has done many of the funniest comedies Hollywood has ever invented. This is not one of them. Bringing Down The House compares poorly with Martin’s most mouthwatering mirth outings like LA Story, Leap Of Faith, My Blue Heaven, Roxanne and The Father Of The Bride (there’re vague elements of the last-mentioned comedy in the father-daughter tussle over the dating ritual). Bringing Down The House is an obvious comedy—if one may call it that. We know for sure that when we pitch two mismatched people together, and that too in the same house, there won’t be any dearth of mirth. Sure enough when attorney Peter Sanderson (Martin) has an unwonted and unwanted guest in the gigantic shape of Charlene (Queen Latifah) all yell breaks loose. Director Adam Shankman (whose Jennifer Lopez fiasco The Wedding Planner last year put his career back by a millennium) is determined to bounce back with a buoyant tale of racial difference and deference. In fact the one really redeeming quality of Bringing Down The House is its unabashed perceptions on inter-racial differences. Steve Martin is white and Queen Latifah is black. And their character’s don’t have to pretend that the glaring colour contrast is merely a state of the mind. In a majority of the scenes Latifah’s character encounters red-hot hostility. There’re at least three major racist characters. There’s Peter’s snoopy neighbour (Betty White) who peeks anxiously from bushes and wonders where the "Negro" voice is coming from. Another character who makes her racism obvious is Peter’s ex-wife’s snooty sister who tells Charlene she should be holding a broom in her hand. To this the quip-equipped Charlene retorts, "I would if I can sweep white trash like you with it." Ouch. Such politically incorrect banter gives the comedy it spiky tangy flair and glosses over its rather tactless and predictable plot construction wherein we know the big black woman will soon sweep the white comic lawyer and his family off their collective feet. The felonious past is soon forgotten. And as Charlene gets into the white domestic groove we grow increasingly wary of the outcome of the uneasy relationship between the two unlikely gender/physicality/race segregated strangers –turned-bum-chums. Evidently the comedy came out of the urge to cast Martin and Latifah together. The two actors succeed in cementing the glaring loopholes in the subtlety department. All the characters are either crudely bigoted or broadly democratic. Hence if Eugene Levy is Steve Martin’s colleague who has the hots for Queen Latifah, the eminently talented Joan Plowright gives a marvellous performance as an upperclass snob who sings songs of slavery to Queen Latifah to make her nostalgic. The dinner sequence where Latifah poses as a maid for Plowright is audaciously irreverent. The insouciant flavour of the farce tickles our fancy for quite a long while. But soon we begin to tire of the triteness and bluntness of the material. The sheer brute-force applied to the racial premise overpowers the film performing talents. Two sequences stand out for their broad and irksome burlesque quality. One is where Latifah beats up Steve Martin’s sister-in-law in a fierce and feisty feast of fury. The other awfully overdone sequence is when Steve Martin gets into a black dude’s get-up to confront the crooks who have put Latifah on the wrong side of the law. Thank God they don’t finally fall into the same bed. Even as we smile at these over-the-top comic inventions we worry at the signs of anxiety which underline almost every humorous situation in the plot. America is ready to laugh about the whole black-white racial divide.