Eve's Bayou

By Richard Corliss | February 4, 2008 | +

Everett

Director: Kasi Lemmons

Year Released: 1997

Cast: Jurnee Smollett, Meagan Good, Samuel L. Jackson, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan

From the opening voice-over — “The summer I killed my father, I was 10 years old” — writer-director Kasi Lemmons‚ debut film weaves a spell of magnolia and menace. The 10-year-old is Eve (Jurnee Smollett), second daughter of Dr. Louis Batiste (Samuel L. Jackson) and his elegant wife Roz (Lynn Whitfield). Louis pushes charm as much as pills, and the local ladies swoon at his touch. “To a certain type of woman,” he notes, “I am a hero. I need to be a hero.” Eve and her 14-year-old sister Cisely (Meagan Good) need him to be one too, and when he proves a sinner, they are devastated. His crime may have been that he didn’t dance with Eve or that he danced too close to Cisely. But since Aunt Mozelle (Debbi Morgan) tells fortunes, Eve is a voodoo priestess once removed. Her curse on her daddy could be fatal.

In rural Louisiana in the ’60s, and in the humid swamps of the Southern Gothic imagination, tenderness and terror are first cousins destined to marry. Eve’s Bayou showed writer-director Kasi Lemmons invading Faulkner-McCullers territory and made it her own. This is a woman’s film, and a showcase for superb actresses, with Morgan outstanding as a sorceress whose gift runs away with her. There are a few visual and character cliches, and we wish that, just once in movies, a fortune teller’s dire prophecy would not automatically come true. But the folks here believe in its power, and they compel the viewer to abandon skepticism, to hide with Eve in the Batiste closet, where skeletons whisper vengeance. An indelible tale of childhood wonder and terror, and one of the finest works by a black filmmaker, Eve’s Bayou has a fierce poise that left me grateful, exhausted and nourished. For the restless spirit, here is true soul food.

Next: Bamboozled

Related Topics: Drama, Eve's Bayou, Kasi Lemmons

Bamboozled

By Richard Corliss | February 4, 2008 | +

Everett

Director: Spike Lee

Year Released: 2000

Cast: Damon Wayans, Savion Glover, Jada Pinkett Smith, Michael Rapaport, Tommy Davidson

Get this movie

When his bosses at a TV network demand that he come up with a hot, edgy series, the token black executive (Damon Wayans) proposes a minstrel show: a format “so negative, so offensive and racist” that it will prove his point about the lack of ethical or aesthetic standards on TV. He hires as his stars a homeless tap dancer (Savion Glover) and his pal (Tommy Davidson). Renamed Mantan and Sleep ‘n Eat, they are given a supporting cast of Topsy, Rastus, Sambo and Aunt Jemima — enough reminders of racism to spur protests from an enraged citizenry. Guess what? The show is a smash. Audience members show up in blackface. The unknowns become stars. America loves Mantan.

One of the coolest things about Spike Lee is his productivity; he makes feature films, documentaries, TV shows and music videos nonstop. He pushes big stars like Denzel Washington (in Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game) and Wesley Snipes (Jungle Fever, Mo’ Better Blues) to do bold, socially pertinent work. But his signature films are those that rankle all viewers; he’s an equal-opportunity annoyer. In Bamboozled, he takes on an entertainment form that died out a century ago but lived on though racial stereotypes (the shiftless, larcenous, strutting Negro with bug eyes) that continued in Hollywood films and black-cast “race movies” through the 1940s. But that’s just a premise Lee uses to condemn whites for manufacturing and buying into that image and, also, blacks for inhabiting restrictive new and polar-opposite categories: the gangsta and the Buppie.

Satire typically proceeds from two impulses: rage at the powerful and contempt for the masses; Lee has both. Bamboozled hits on an important truth in race consciousness: we all have 20/20 vision of the past but it’s the present that blurs. Today, most whites are ashamed of the degrading racist stereotypes paraded in the movies’ first half century. Years from now, blacks may be chagrined to recall that their young men addressed one another familiarly as “Nigger” and chose hoodlums as their cultural gods.