Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
9/25/08
I hate the New York Yankees.
My baseball team of choice is the Texas Rangers, who've appeared in a grand
total of 3 postseason series, all Division Series losses to the New York
Yankees in which my Rangers were wildly outplayed and won only once in
ten games. These were soul-crushing, heartbreaking losses and I could
have processed them by directing anger and disgust at the players I rooted
so hard for who let me down. But that would require introspection
about the choice to root for an out-of-state team that almost always loses
and recrimination of players who'd once again be my favorites the following
year. The better, the easier choice: hate the Yankees.
And, oh, how I do! I try not to live the parts of my life that actually
matter that way, but don't always succeed. We're all guilty of hating
third parties that remind us of the things we don't like about ourselves
or our lives, and at its' best, Neil LaBute's Lakeview Terrace is
a fascinating meditation on our enthusiasm to embrace hatred of random
people. It's also a throwback to the “Neighbor From Hell” cycle of
thrillers that held sway in the late 80's and early 90's, but it's a smart
and well crafted one. Terrace is not a movie for viewers who
need to like characters to empathize with them, and the ending is pat when
it should have been complex. But a sensational lead performance by
Samuel L. Jackson makes you feel for a dangerous bigot, and LaBute keeps
the tension at a steady boil, making asking the neighbor to turn down his
music seem at least as dangerous as a gun to the head.
These aren't easy times for
Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson). His wife died three years ago, leaving
him to raise two rebellious children alone while facing death every day
as an officer with the LAPD. One day, a new couple moves in next
door. Chris (Patrick Wilson) and Lisa Mattson (Kerry Washington)
are trying to establish their independence from her wealthy father (Ron
Glass). She desperately wants kids while Chris isn't sure.
She's banned him from smoking, so he sneaks cigarettes in the car and flicks
them into the yard next door. A trained officer, Abel notices all
these things, but most of all, he notices that he's white and she's black.
When the two of them make love in their outdoor pool in full view of the
Turner family, the Officer's initial hostility toward his new neighbors
becomes something more. His security floodlights shine directly into
their bedroom, but don't reveal the identity of someone cutting wires on
their air conditioner. Every time he and Chris are alone, he makes
veiled references about people “like them” not being welcome in the neighborhood.
Attempts by the Mattsons to be nice fall worse than flat: an invite
to their housewarming party unleashes his rage on the entire neighborhood
and when Lisa engages in girl talk with Abel's surly daughter Celia (Regine
Nehy), he explodes. Things aren't so great between the newlyweds
either: Lisa “forgot” to take her birth control pills and now she's
pregnant. Chris is happy to channel his anger into escalating the
war, putting in floodlights of his own and planting trees that extend into
Abel's yard. Facing a date with Internal Affairs after teaching a
gun-wielding father (Caleeb Pinket) a particularly rough lesson, the Officer
takes advantage of his kids' annual visit to their Aunt to kick things
up a notch. If loud all-night bachelor parties and chainsaw attacks
on the foliage won't get them out, perhaps it's time for more extreme measures:
for Abel Turner, there's only room for one of these two households on Lakeview
Terrace.
It's easy to sympathize with
Abel Turner: he's lost his wife to a freak accident, can't understand
the kids he's responsible for at all and does one of the hardest jobs in
America. It's the way he chooses to respond to these stresses that
makes him a villain, and while I don't need to tell you that nobody does
angry and superior better than Jackson, it's the way he keeps us understanding
the simmering frustrations beneath his bigotry and violence that makes
the performance special. Abel is TERRIFYING, and it's not just because
he carries a gun. He knows no social grace, refuses to back down
in any situation no matter how minor, and basically challenges every last
“live and let live” social cue our diverse society needs to keep running.
His new neighbors are in no position to face him: the Mattsons are
so proud to be first-time homeowners, they imagine that status gives them
an absolute right to do whatever they want, with no need to modulate their
behavior to the quirks of the people who can see down into their pool and
through their open windows. Time and again, they have chances to
possibly head off the inevitable confrontation by apologizing and meaning
it, but instead they're somewhere between amused and dismissive of the
Crazy Old Guy. Doesn't he know who they are? But, of course,
once first the pregnancy issue and then the mind games Abel's only too
happy to play start showing the cracks in their marriage, fighting back
beats the hell out of trying to work it out.
One of the niftiest things
about the screenplay by David Loughery and Howard Korder is that you could
rank Abel, Chris and Lisa in any order of sympathy depending on your own
issues. I'd go Lisa, Abel, Chris, but they all do things during the
story that are horribly wrong out of self-interest, self-delusion and pure,
simple spite. Race has nothing to do with what happened to Abel's
wife, his relationship with his kids, Lisa's desire to get pregnant or
the way Chris feels emasculated by her parents, but it's RIGHT THERE.
Race requires no introspection, no cause and effect, it's just a big ol'
sign around somebody's neck saying “My problems are your fault”, and all
three characters go for it hard. Would it be better if all this was
headed someplace more complicated than its' Inevitable Outcome? Sure.
But even if it turns out to be a plain old thriller, Lakeview Terrace
has a lot more on its' mind than just about any plain old thriller I can
think of.
But many viewers will absorb
it only as a thriller, and it's a pretty good one. After his crash-and-burn
failure with the Wicker Man remake, Neil LaBute seems an unlikely
choice for any kind of genre assignment, but he shines with material far
more down-to-Earth. While the gunplay and violence are scary, the
harshest moments in Lakeview Terrace involve the awkwardness of
social interaction, and once the block has been completely filled with
unsympathetic people (all the neighbors we meet are even more boorish than
the Mattsons) we never know what to expect. It's not easy to be unsympathetic
while keeping us engaged in what happens to you, and Wilson and Washington
are superb. I didn't “like” Chris at all, but I felt for his impotence
in the face of all the challenges around him. On the other hand,
Lisa is very likable, but also quietly sneaky and entitled in ways she
never has to account for. Ron Glass has a couple fun scenes as her
elitist father.
Some will find the story
of a black man raging against an interracial couple to be distasteful,
but this is no Disclosure (remember the hubub over “Hollywood's
first movie about sexual harassment” only to have the harasser be a woman
whose advances were part of a corporate conspiracy?): a white man
in the role would tend to make the story about nothing BUT the interracial
couple, while the casting of Jackson levels the playing field and asks
us to really decide what we think about the issues in play without having
Whitey as the convenient villain. It's final scenes may leave you
wondering where all that complexity went, but while it's working, Lakeview
Terrace is a smart, intense thriller filled with food for thought about
the futility of hatred. Except for the Yankees: I still fully
support hating them. |
