BaadAsssss Cinema; My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Never thought I'd be in a movie with Samuel L. Jackson, but there we are?dueling commentators?in Isaac Julien's BaadAsssss Cinema. We're kept apart by Julien's mise-en-scene, intercut with other pundits and filmmakers. But Julien's subject?70s blaxploitation movies?causes our memories of that era to brush knuckles as part of the film's dialectic. Our separate narrative spaces?from critic's vantage point to actor's perspective?cohere through Julien's attempt at providing common ground.
Person to person, Jackson and I might talk at cross purposes. Money-vs.-Principle. An argument that often goes nowhere. But Julien uses these different purposes to analyze blaxploitation as a distinct Hollywood genre and inadvertent social movement. This makes BaadAsssss Cinema, airing on the Independent Film Channel, the most serious document yet of the disputatious cultural past black Americans contend with without resolution. Julien pursues this seemingly frivolous movie trend rather than his usual high-art topics because he knows blaxploitation is now a shared pop burden.
Movie culture has difficulty ridding itself of American racial and cultural stereotypes, which may explain why Walter Hill's Undisputed?which looked like the perfect movie to revive blaxploitation's fascination, adding a greater and updated political sense?didn't ignite box offices. Instead, we seemed destined to downgrade black film topics, or leave them to white hipster delectation. Julien accepts Quentin Tarantino's description of blaxploitation as belonging to the genre of "crime movies" but QT's limited measure neglects how black folks looked for more than that in the 70s era. This view of 70s cinemas is too narrow (it excludes such films as Ganja & Hess, Sounder, Brothers, Cotton Comes to Harlem, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, The Education of Sonny Carson). I suppose Julien wants to better understand black filmmakers' cultural tendency toward raunch and trash. His interview subjects reflect on their formative teenage experience of these movies. Jackson is the only performer interviewed who seems not to have grown beyond that. Like QT, he maintains an adolescent perspective.
If anything is missing from BaadAsssss Cinema, it's a scrutiny of the political economy behind blaxploitation. We don't get the workings of Hollywood, only suppositions about the industry's practices. I'm not privy?except to a nameless informant who disclosed Pam Grier's mere $85,000 salary for Jackie Brown?yet Jackson, an insider, has no interest in thinking politically, or analyzing the way Hollywood works. Even Robert Evans' The Kid Stays in the Picture offered more disclosure. Julien needed the kind of transparent tough-talk heard when Evans recalled his "genius" idea to get an Italian to direct The Godfather. Evans claims there were no major Italian directors in Hollywood history?evidently dismissing Frank Capra. One takes from Evans' anecdote a realization of how Coppola turned around Capra's view of America and ethnicity. He did it by taking the opportunity to elevate a raunch-and-trash genre and imbue it with political truth and emotional profundity.
For some reason Hollywood discourages black filmmakers from following Coppola's example. Think of what resulted when Antoine Fuqua directed Training Day, leaving out political truth, emotional profundity and social authenticity. Fuqua indulged blaxploitation's worst, most juvenile, baadasssss legacy.
There's nothing baadasssss (or even vaguely rebellious) about the movies Jackson and his ilk make today. Since the early 90s spike of gangsta movies Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society, neo-blaxploitation filmmakers have been working on the short leash of post-Reagan license and hiphop cynicism now revealed to be nothing more than a new form of youth exploitation only less interesting (less politically motivated) than the 70s variety. Conscientious and artful, Julien structures BaadAsssss Cinema to make sense of black Hollywood today and the recent Oscar wins by Denzel Washington and Halle Berry. His concept is the closest any filmmaker has come to the intelligent, cogent inquiry into pop culture made by black British scholar Paul Gilroy in his books Small Acts and Black Atlantic, yet BaadAsssss Cinema remains an outsider's view of an American phenomenon. Unlike the fabled British pop musicians who studied and were inspired by black American music, black British filmmakers have almost nothing to learn from blaxploitation (Julien's Young Soul Rebels and Looking for Langston are worth a thousand Eve's Bayous and Set It Offs and Training Days); they can only stare at the phenomenon in bewildered awe. Criticizing it harshly might not seem brotherly, still Julien might have applied his usual academic rigor with brotherly firmness and blues feeling. Blues artists' honesty and genius aroused and delighted British onlookers, however black American filmmakers work in a constrained environment that rarely allows the honest creativity of black American blues and gospel, like black pop used to be. Most of today's black Hollywood filmmaking isn't baadasssss but perverse.
Although it's skewed to a mature, no-longer-hip audience, My Big Fat Greek Wedding deserves to be called an alternative hit. Its cross-ethnic love story (large-featured Greek young woman?no longer a girl?falls in love with a slightly dull, remote WASP young man) is not fairytale magical but a class comedy. The Old World strictures and solidarity that immigrant enclaves sustain for New World survival and success are broken down by the second-generation's desire to escape from repressive tradition. A better movie would show that Toula (Nia Vardalos), the Greek old maid, feels the same impatience and pride as her suitor, Ian (John Corbett), does. Still, the film rewards the same sense of community that blaxploitation movies once exploited. Toula's love story (unlike the complex, denigrating cliches of blaxploitation crime stories) is recognizable by all tribes.
Offering chagrin and comfort, Greek Wedding embraces ethnic paradox. It has a quality that has been in disrepute in pop culture since the Beats: wholesomeness. It airs out that modern dissatisfaction with what you are, as an irony of American democracy, and then very sanely reproves it. Yes, it's common ground. Not only a selling tool of the film's clever marketing (the tv ads briefly substitute the word "Greek" in the title with other ethnic denominations usually celebrated in the mainstream) but a familiar, feel-good message. (It's got the same tickle as such family comedies from You Can't Take It With You to Tobacco Road, from Goodbye, Columbus to Lovers and Other Strangers, from My Favorite Year to Soul Food.)
Vardalos' original stage play?essentially an ethnic standup routine turned into skits?conveyed her embarrassed-and-loving relation to her own family. Toula's marriage shocks her father (Michael Constantine) but brings out the adaptability of her wild family?especially the women's emotional resources: her tactical mother (Lainie Kazan), her resilient aunt (Andrea Martin) and others. This ethnic recall evokes the wonder of a Tony Gatlif film: it is ethnically specific but features the greater wonder of human specificity. Gatlif's gypsy tales (alternately set in the Middle East, Spain, France) reveal an international soulfulness. Greek Wedding never reaches the same exhilarating level of cinema as Gatlif's Latcho Drom or Vengo but it's admirable.
Vardalos' sleeper success (the film has grossed more than $80 million to date) proves the kind of triumph some of us wait for Jennifer Lopez to achieve, instead of trying to disguise her apparent ethnicity for one that conforms to easy marketing. (In the ludicrous Enough, Lopez at one point goes by an Irish name.) Vardalos is photographed as plain, her large, conventional Greek features not so much a matter of pride as a fact of life?of what Lopez sang as "I'm Real." Pop record buyers know this truth, so do older moviegoers. Others must catch up.