|
CHANNING ARRIVES Based on his successful theatre comedy about an actual case of a young black pretending to be Sidney Poitier’s son, John Guare’s verbose screenplay of Six Degrees of Separation is very smart, quick-witted and evokes confessions: most of us have pretended to be someone other than who we really are. Being taken in by the con, according to Guare and director Fred Schepisi, isn’t the more serious concern, it’s in admitting the violation has turned inward—turned into the victims’ revelation in recognizing something’s missing within themselves to have allowed the deception. A chancy game Guare and Schepisi play, because in this day and age of blaming everyone else for our faults and shortcomings, audiences—especially movie audiences—want to remain safe from introspection. What Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channing, as the husband & wife “victimized” by Will Smith’s charming style and lies, discover—in an inquest as send up of Freudian familial squabbling—is what they’ve held private suspicions about all along. (And repeatedly confirmed in the parents’ conversations with their screaming, spoiled, smart-ass kids.) Channing and Sutherland encapsulate the art crowd’s “me-ism,” but wouldn’t one of their friends or enemies be catty enough to suggest they’re among the last to be concerned with who is or isn’t a fraud? (Sutherland admits to what is illegal trafficing in hidden-from-alimony works of art.) Will Smith is so assured and unaffected his character’s sexuality becomes secondary—it’s a small bonus wrapped in his masquerade. His voice at times approximates what a Poitier son might sound like, if he had one, and only the tiniest bits of the star’s pompous manner of speech are detected. Smith’s pleasures in being phony, in the joys of never growing up, are contrasted against Sutherland’s calculated verbiage and angry outbursts, which ultimately reveal him as a philistine. Stockard Channing’s been fighting to break through on screen ever since The Fortune and The Big Bus. Her defenders point to Grease as her most successful attempt, yet who but Rosie O’Donnell could sing lyrics about Sandra Dee? (Channing’s Rizzo is so much older than everyone else she’s less a smoking, fornicating chick from the wrong side of the tracks and more the school’s loosest secretary.) In Six Degrees, she has the most challenging role thus far in her career. Her character finds she can communicate more easily and express a love more fully with a gay black gentleman thief than with her own children, none of whom she really knows, or her husband, finally realizing they’ve been a mismatch. As actor Channing takes theatre monologues to rare movie heights; she verbalizes on brief encounters not just as life-changing experiences but as means to establish her first rapport with an adult movie audience and succeeds. (Sometimes, though, she looks as if she lacks symmetry of the eyes.) But whose fantasy of desecration is it allowing her character to physically swack at art? Doesn’t it matter she probably isn’t capable of such an act? As she gears up for her emancipation, how many of us wondered if she was helped along in her escape by the apartment she & Sutherland live in, with ceilings inducing claustrophobia, making us want to duck and cover. And those drapes! If the designer’s name is Patrizia von Brandenstein, we’re expecting a bit more “von” in the decor. Text COPYRIGHT © 2007 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
|