The trailers have played endlessly. Steve Martin stars as a yuppie who discovers that his blind Internet date turns out to be an ex-con played by rapper-turned-actress Queen Latifah. She invades his life, camps out in his home, charms his kids and does everything an “unconventional” comedy heroine can do to loosen up her tighter-than-a-coil bumbling hero. In no time, the lawyer without a working knowledge of street slang is wearing hip-hop clothes and visiting inner city clubs. We get it – Martin’s in desperate need of letting go and getting in touch with his inner “gangsta.”
This all makes the find-your-true-self sitcom “Bringing Down the House” sound much, much worse than it actually is. At first glance, the movie seems to be one of those middle-of-the-road, cookie-cutter cut-and-paste jobs in which an uptight WASP is forced to let go of his old self in order to learn the real value of tapping into that hippie/party-boy/sensitive schmuck that lies within. I can almost hear audiences from across the globe groaning as I speak.
Yet “Bringing Down the House,” directed without flair by Adam Shankman but acted with precision by a whip-smart cast, doesn’t elicit the expected groans. Instead this comedy, however routine it is, manages the now all-too-rare feet of generating genuine laughs.
The state of mainstream cinematic comedy is now officially in dire straights. Look at this year’s movies. From “Just Married” to “Old School,” they all fall into the same category of greasy corporate junk food. These are movies that have all the heft and substance of a Twinkie, yet there’s a crucial wrong here other than their collective weightlessness. These movies that are designed to make us laugh have lost one essential element: the giddy specters of joy and fun.
Today’s comedies are mirthless assembly line products that seem to be designed from some weathered blueprint hanging on the wall. There’s a sort of scientific formula to these movies wherein the variables of the plot can be altered and shifted, yet the results are always the same damn thing. Occasionally, a moment or two will entice laughter from the audience; usually, the audiences are forced to sit there, looking glum, as amusement begins to dwindle and dry up.
In other words, “Bringing Down the House” looks like yet another pre-packaged concept comedy in which humor plays second fiddle to flavorless artifice. Watching a movie like this is like building a Lincoln Log cabin – you get all the tools needed for construction, yet there’s only so many things you can build with your given supplies. Message mongering about individuality and finding your true identity? Check. A ridiculous, only-in-a-comedy-movie climax, often involving guns and criminals, that drastically shifts the tone of the movie? Check. Divorced, overworked, absentee parents who learn to spend more time with their children? Check, check and once again check. But there’s a major difference between “Bringing Down the House” and, oh say, “A Guy Thing.” “Bringing Down the House” is actually funny.
There are things “Bringing Down the House” is not. It’s not creative. It was not built on a foundation of storytelling ingenuity. It does not break free from its time-tested mathematical formula. However, the sum of the whole is greater than its parts.
Martin employs his trademark dry-humored slapstick for the role of Peter Sanderson, a WASPy tax attorney who lives in an uptight neighborhood, and works for a conservative law firm, planning a business deal for a very stuffy matron. Peter’s divorced and too into his job to take his kids on a planned Hawaiian getaway. He meets a fellow lawyer over Instant Messenger, but his blind date turns out to be Charlene (rapper/actress Queen Latifah), an ex-con who blackmails her way into Peter’s life so she can get the lawyer to expunge her record, pleading that she’s innocent. In the process of invading his life, Charlene teaches Peter how to open up, win back his wife and live life the way he wants rather than fitting into the roles that society expects him to fit into.
The message that “Bringing Down the House” has to offer – something about being true to yourself – is used to bang the audience over the head. Yet the movie has the same satirical assurance that Martin movies such as “Bowfinger” have. It’s certainly shocking to hear sweet old Betty White, as Martin’s bridge-loving neighbor, spewing out offensive racial epithets and to hear Queen Latifah mockingly talk like a slave girl in one as people call her “Jemima.” This stuff is offensive and provocative to be sure, and it’s surprising to see and hear it used in a whitebread comedy such as “Bringing Down The House.” When White said Latinos only belonged in the neighborhood as gardeners, my jaw dropped to the ground. As the movie progressed, however, the laughs began to build up in intensity and volume. For a movie that seems too timid to break free from storytelling convention it has a strange, and welcome, level of guts when it comes to prodding our society’s racial stereotypes. Some will be offended; they will be the ones who don’t get the joke.
Martin gives his loosest performance in a while, while the expressive and even touching Latifah demonstrates just why she’s up for an Oscar this year. Bonus casting points: Eugene Levy, the great comic foil from “American Pie,” “SCTV” and Christopher Guest movies (“Waiting For Guffman,” “Best in Show”) appears as Martin’s best friend, a middle-aged man with a fondness for big, black women and an unexpected knowledge of street slang (“You got me straight trippin’ boo.”) The way Levy, he of the caterpillar eyebrows, deadpans in Ebonics may be the funniest thing about the movie.
