Wearing the Pants
Spike Lee is the man, not Amanda Bynes
By Andy Klein
Inside Man marks the closest Spike Lee has come in his career to being a director for hire: The film was produced by (among others) Brian Grazer, Ron Howard's partner. Who ever expected to see "Imagine Entertainment Presents ... A Spike Lee Joint" on the screen?
Lee has written almost all of his previous films; and those he didn't write tended to mesh directly with his central concerns - life in New York City and racism. Inside Man has only a few passing references to racial issues; and, while it's set in New York and has a distinctly New York feel, the story could have been transferred to Los Angeles with no essential changes.
In fact, it's the sort of commercial thriller that Hollywood thrives on ... and a damned good one at that. Lee changes gears with barely a hitch.
In his fourth Lee feature, Denzel Washington stars as Keith Frazier, an NYPD detective currently under investigation regarding some missing money. Despite the cloud of suspicion, Frazier draws a high-profile assignment - hostage negotiator at a downtown bank robbery.
In the movie's opening shot, one Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) addresses the camera and claims credit for the heist. Russell and his very small crew have entered the bank dressed as painters, disabled the surveillance cameras, and taken all the customers and employees as hostages.
At a glance, it might seem that this is your basic bungled bank job, with hostages as an afterthought, but there are a number of very odd aspects that suggest otherwise. First of all, the crooks are prepared for hostages and treat them oddly, insisting they strip and don the same masks and overalls they themselves are wearing. Secondly, Russell's gang engages in a lot of furious activity, without ever paying much attention to all the money lying about.
Frazier and his partner, Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor), know that something strange is going on, but they're also distracted by political pressure. Bank president Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) is panicked that he might be outed (as what, we don't know until halfway through) by something he has stashed in a safe deposit box - something incredibly damaging to him. He hires high-powered fixer Madeline White (Jodie Foster) to make sure that this something either stays where it is or is destroyed.
It's a sign of how slick Lee's direction is that we don't get hung up very long on the implausibility of this plot development. Why wouldn't Case already have destroyed the evidence? If it's so secret, what makes him think anybody might be looking for it? And, if nobody's looking for it, isn't it more dangerous for him to confide in White than to simply hope the robbers either don't loot his box or loot it and toss the damaging material away as worthless? Whatever.
White is so self-possessed and icy cool that we don't doubt for a second that she could fix a World Series or a presidential election if the money were good enough. She strides around, gently bullying mayors, cops, and crooks alike. Her cold, amoral confidence is no less horrifying than the evil in Case's past.
The screenplay from first-timer Russell Gewirtz is so full of teases that very few in the audience will predict all the twists; even better, it doesn't cheat. We get early hints to the final revelation that suggest this twist, but that viewers are unlikely to pick up on.
The downside of the story's intricacies is that the denouement takes too long. The energy level drops after the heist is over; the 20 minutes it takes to reveal everything are slow going.
Lee and Gewirtz use an interesting narrative trick that risks deflating suspense while setting up the ending: within the first half hour, we start seeing flashforwards to Frazier and Mitchell interrogating hostages after their liberation. As a result, we know that, even at worst, not everyone dies. In all, it works to the film's advantage, but just barely.
There are no Training Day edges in Washington's character: He's not perfect, but we know he's basically a good guy, and the actor is in full laid-back mode. Ejiofor is fine in a thankless, blandly written role. (Will he never get another part as rich as in Dirty Pretty Things?)
It's hard to assess Foster's performance because the character is so inhuman. Foster makes White such a steamroller that she almost comes across as machine-like - her features are too well-defined, her face too glowing, her legs too perfectly lathed, to be real. Qualities that attract us seem downright creepy here. Even as I was admiring her work, I wondered whether it was really Foster or some advanced computer simulation. It's not just that her character has clearly never felt the need to perspire; it's that she seems plastic-coated, without a blemish or a trace of body hair.
Using the cheap excuse that it also has the word "man" in its title, let's dispense with last week's She's the Man in a few paragraphs. Inside Man may be slick and sleek by Spike Lee standards, but She's the Man makes it look like The Brothers Karamazov. It's a computer-generated comedy, based on the tastes and preferences of that always cutting-edge demographic, girls between the ages of eight and fifteen.
Amanda Bynes - chirpier than a dozen nests of new-hatched birds - plays Viola, a high school soccer player, whose team is disbanded for lack of recruits. When her coach - in a move that, in the real world, would get him successfully sued in less time than the movie's length - refuses to let her try out for the main (i.e., boys') soccer team, she decides to play soccer for a rival boarding school, masquerading as her brother, Sebastian, who has conveniently flown off to London to play with his band.
There, decked in the least convincing crossdressing garb since Norman Bates, she falls for her roommate, "Duke" Orsino (Channing Tatum), who is stuck on Olivia (Laura Ramsey), who is stuck on Sebastian, who is really Viola.
If the names or the plot contrivances sound the least bit familiar, it may be because She's the Man is an updating of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Some of the equivalences are clever, but the whole loses quite a bit in the translation.
The woman-in-drag role in Twelfth Night, as in The Merchant of Venice, has rarely been played convincingly; it's accepted as convention that the other characters really don't notice that this is transparently a woman in disguise. In a more realistic - or at least more familiar - contemporary setting, however, disbelief is more difficult to suspend; and Bynes's character is never convincing enough to fool a newborn. It doesn't help that "Duke" and Olivia can't tell her from Sebastian, even from behind, despite the fact that Sebastian is about six inches taller; or that, as a boy, Bynes looks no more than 12 years old, something the plot occasionally acknowledges without really fretting over.
Published: 03/23/2006
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