Fat is a filmist issue
Black humour at its biggest
Norbit *
Starring Eddie Murphy, Thandie Newton, Terry Crews
Directed by Brian Robbins
102 mins
US (2007)
If you haven’t seen The Last King of Scotland, reviewed two weeks ago, catch it while it’s still on for a brilliant exposition of the slip into sadism. But if, on the other hand, you are a total masochist take yourself off to watch Norbit. Hard to imagine this is the same Eddie Murphy who has put in a sensitive performance in Dreamgirls, this film is causing revolt in the US where the big and fat issue is Murphy’s apparent misogyny. Unlike The Nutty Professor where being fat was OK, in this film, scripted by Murphy and in which he plays three roles – Norbit, the mild mannered, put upon guy searching for love, Mr. Wong the owner of the orphanage where he was raised and his wife, the ultimate Big Momma from hell, Rasputia – fat is simply frightening.
OK, confession, this film made me laugh, it has a few very funny scenes and some great one-liners. I loved the bit in pool where Rasputia is told she has to wear bikini bottoms, only to lift up her belly to reveal them. But fat jokes wear thin after a while and there is an unrelenting hysteria in this film that is exhausting. A few slapstick scenes work, it’s politically incorrect, so what? The real weakness of the film is the wishy-washy love interest as Norbit tries to regain his childhood sweetheart, played by Thandie Newton.
The film has been attacked for the cruelty of its humour, but I thought it was sassy Rasputia and her sidekicks that won the day. The jokes are black and indeed for the most part against blacks, but this is the mainstay of the stand-up comedy from which Murphy came. If you like the whoopee cushion mentality of five-year-olds in the back of the school bus who find farts funny, you’ll enjoy this. One has to ask if Murphy is suffering from some kind of delusional mania that makes him think that he should play all the parts in every film? I mean, how fat does this guy have to get before he takes up the whole screen and we can put a pin in him and send him splattering his latexed alter egos into the ether? I don’t think the hysteria in US that the film is offensive to women, blacks and fat people is particularly justified; it is too absurd and too bizarre to be taken seriously, but the best bits of the film are in the trailer, so save yourself the money and watch two minutes online.
What’s new at the DVD store
In the DVD store are some brilliant new films, which may not make it on to the big screen here. Half Nelson, which earned Ryan Gosling an Oscar nomination for best actor, follows the life and low life of a struggling crackhead teacher in Brooklyn. Fat is still an issue, there is a line where the lanky, hollow cheeked Mr. Dunne meets his old love out of rehab, she jokes that she looks fat. “No,” he answers, “You look healthy”. This is a brave, thoughtful film, which tackles dark subjects with a lightness of touch and humour and shows that the world isn’t black and white but shades of grey. Like the excellent Australian film Little Fish, it doesn’t glamourise drug addiction, but gives the viewer a real insight into how addicts can be decent, hardworking folk. The camera technique, which uses close ups to imitate documentary style, allows no leeway to the actors, and it is reliant on the superb performances delivered by Gosling and his unlikely soulmate of a student, Drey (played by Shareeka Epps), who, finding him slumped in the girls toilets after a basketball match, protects him. Slow to start, stay with this film as it just gets better and better and I defy you to remain untouched. Unlike Norbit, there are no crass stereotypes to be found, Anthony Mackie who plays Drey’s drug dealing father Frank, is a likeable rogue. Underpinning the film is Gosling’s idealistic Hegelian History teacher, who believes you have to teach children to think before you can teach them and that history is about opposing forces. It is the unlikely coming together of the strong young black girl and her weak white teacher who can both offer something the other lacks that is at the heart of this story and the change that takes place.
The Science of Sleep is written and directed by Michel Gondry, who also directed the wonderful Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. Not as cleverly or intricately plotted as Sunshine, nevertheless, this film is as original and eccentric. The story of Stephane, played by the charismatic Mexican actor Gael Garcia Banal of The Motorcycle Diaries, is about an imaginative young designer who moves to Paris and is a lucid dreamer, his real and fantasy worlds constantly interact, which generates a magic quality in the film and much of its humour. The love interest is provided by the girl living in the flat opposite, quirkily played by jolie laide, Charlotte Gainsbourg, daughter of Serge. This is a visually exciting film, totally unpredictable and full of tender romance. Unusually sexy but with very little sex, it is charming without being saccharine. Banal’s intelligent performance makes his whimsical and surreal world surprisingly convincing and for the daydreamers among us it will be as near a film gets to explaining our flights of fancy.
In the DVD store already but not coming to the island’s large screens for a few weeks is the extraordinary, Oscar-winning, Pan’s Labyrinth from the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro. The film, which also explores a fantasy world, centres on the story of a young girl, Ofelia, caught up in the bloody aftermath of Civil War in 1944 Fascist Spain, when she is sent to the country with her pregnant mother to meet her new and cruel army officer step father. It is both a wonderful and terrifying commentary on war and childhood. On one level this is a visually amazing gothic fairy story on another is it an immensely moving film about the monsters of our imagination and the man made monsters born of the horrors of conflict. The violence is bare and barbaric, the human relationships are sensitively and thoughtfully portrayed by a relatively unknown cast and the acting is exemplary. It is a masterpiece of magic realism and imaginative cinematography, but it is also a heart wrenching film about bullies and brutality.
Beautifully filmed, it is a more than a fairy tale about fairy tales it is probably the best film of last year. If you can wait, hold on until it comes to a large screen in a few weeks and be prepared to enter an allegorical world of good and evil, dreams and nightmares and the power of the human spirit to survive.
