Playing race

>> Men of Honor fails to move

by MATTHEW HAYS

How could anyone attack a film, based on a true story, about the first African-American ever to become a navy deep-sea diver?

Hell, I won't shy away from the challenge. Yes, Hollywood consistently comes under attack for its underrepresentation of blacks on film and its lack of job opportunities for minorities. So a film like Men of Honor should come as a pleasant surprise, something to celebrate.

But the film, directed by George Tillman Jr., unravels pretty horrendously, leaping from one painful cliché to the next. Cuba Gooding Jr. plays Carl Brashear, a man who escaped working the fields to climb the naval hierarchy, fighting prejudice and breaking racial barriers every step of the way. This would be fine, if the filmmaking depicting the fight were handled with a remote amount of subtlety or nuance. The first and perhaps worst sign: the music in this insipid film was constantly telling us when our hearts should be warmed.

Nastiest of all, earnest films like these have an aura of self-congratulation about them that is entirely nauseating. Do Hollywood studio types really think that making a film suggesting that racial segregation is wrong is somehow brave or controversial? Who would disagree with them?

Worse still, the buddy relationship Gooding Jr.'s character has with his superior officer, Robert De Niro, is telling of one of Hollywood's age-old race problems. Indeed, the press notes to this film indicate that the character De Niro plays never actually existed, but is rather the creation of one of the screenwriters. What Men of Honor does indicate is Hollywood's continued reluctance to make a film about racial breakthroughs featuring only black protagonists. Instead, the unwritten rule is that white audiences will not identify with blacks onscreen, no matter how noble they're made or how undignified their suffering. In order to maximize the box-office take, screenplays must be made into buddy films, in which whites become equally heroic in the fight for black rights, neatly assuaging any possible guilt among white audience members (enter De Niro). These films allow whites to feel horrified by decades-old racism while feeling virtuous at the same time.

Carl Brashear's story undoubtedly needed to be told. But Men of Honor is less a film about leaps forward in American race relations than an indication of just how far the country still has to go. Go see Bamboozled instead.

Men of Honor opens Friday, Nov. 10