From the Lawrence Bender production company A Band Apart (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Fresh)comes this seemingly ingenious film that tackles race relations head on, and comes up stunningly flat. Director Nakano’s tale of an America where African-Americans are the majority and the privileged and the white race is the downtrodden and poor so oversimplifies the problems of race relations in America today that its intended purpose as a wake-up call, a way to spotlight deteriorating race relations in a new and fresh light, is completely overshadowed by the film’s startling mediocrity and pedantic moralizing. It’s almost as if Ted Turner had resurrected some well-intentioned Twilight Zone and colorized it for the Nineties, diluting the subtleties in favor of the obvious. Travolta plays Louis Pinnock, an average Joe who loses his factory job one day when a random twist of fate leaves his black boss displeased with a triviality. Without the job and the raise he was counting on, Pinnock and his wife Marsha (Lynch) soon lose their home to their black landlord and are effectively down-and-out in Beverly Slums. Pinnock (after a Rodney King-style beating by some thuggish cops) decides to kidnap his employer — the wealthy, casually racist Thaddeus Thomas (Belafonte) — in order to… what? He doesn’t know, really, and neither do we. As the film progresses, with Pinnock displaying the pockmarked urban ghetto he calls home to the bewildered, nervous Thomas, the Twilight Zone aspects multiply, until it’s all you can do to keep from spotting Serling hovering around every corner. Certainly, all involved had only the best of intentions, but that’s no excuse for what can only be called a cinematic trivialization of America’s explosive racial tension. So simple, so broad are White Man’s Burden’s paint strokes — from the gritty camerawork of Pinnock’s mean streets to the burnished opulence of Thomas’ home and family — that no real lesson outside of the obviously mundane can be elicited, and that’s a real shame. It’s not so much a flip-flop as it is pure flim-flam.
This article appears in December 8 • 1995 (Cover).