"Something New"

Feb. 3, 2006 | January and February have become the months when moviegoers -- and some critics, too -- temporarily shut off their feelers, figuring that in terms of mainstream movies, at least, nothing particularly interesting is going to surface until sometime around when the crocuses show. But it's dangerous to allow moviegoing habits to be driven by the market: Even though plenty of bad movies do come limping along in the early months of the year, other January-February orphans are simply smaller movies that don't stand a chance against big-money blockbusters, or movies that a studio simply has no idea how to sell. You never know what's going to come out of the winter dead zone, and Sanaa Hamri's charming and surprisingly sharp romantic comedy "Something New" is a case in point.

"Something New" is an interracial romance, a category that's no longer considered particularly daring, partly thanks to the dull-witted, timid way most pictures have handled the idea of love that crosses color lines: When we start getting lousy mainstream comedies on the subject, like the Bernie Mac-Ashton Kutcher disaster "Guess Who," we're all tempted to start thinking (or at least hoping) it's been played out.

But the romantic-comedy formula depends on the idea of young lovers' facing deceptively simple-seeming obstacles. And if even something as basic as different family backgrounds can still cause problems between young lovers, then why not race? Even so, what's most interesting about "Something New" is that although it spends a fair amount of time exploring certain relationship problems related to race, the biggest dangers this particular young couple face are racially neutral: The torpedoes that threaten to sink them are bad communication and the heroine's inability to let go of the rigid recipe for happiness that she's been clinging to for years. In the grand scheme, it doesn't matter much that this heroine, Kenya (Sanaa Lathan), is African-American and her love interest, Brian (Simon Baker), is white. What does matter is that Kenya -- as well as some of her family and friends -- can't shake the idea that race always needs to be an issue.

And in some ways, "Something New" is just as much about class issues as it is about race. Kenya is a highly educated professional with a great job at a large corporate accounting firm, and she comes from a very well-heeled family: Her father (Earl Billings) is the head of neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Hospital; her mother (Alfre Woodard) enjoys the stature that her husband's job brings her, and she also likes tasteful clothes and expensive jewelry. Kenya's brother (Donald Faison) is just getting his start as a lawyer, and although for now he's just having fun in the romance department, dating a succession of comically good-natured bimbos, his dates are always black. He considers it a given that Kenya would never cross the color line, either.

And at first, Kenya has no intention of doing so. In an early scene, she and her three best girlfriends (played with chatty liveliness by Golden Brooks, Wendy Raquel Robinson and Taraji P. Henson), all single and all in their 30s, gather for drinks and lament how tough it is to find the IBM ("ideal black man"). They glance disparagingly at a nearby table, where a black guy sits with his white date, citing "that" sort of thing as the reason 42.4 percent of black women -- a figure that's repeated several times in the movie -- have never been married. Their resentment may be real, but the movie also recognizes, in a very sly way, that the "white women are stealing our good black men" charge is a convenient fallback mechanism, a way of blaming someone else -- anyone else -- for unruly and unpredictable social realities.

So when one of Kenya's work friends sets her up on a blind date, she shows up at the appointed time looking for a black guy. And waiting for her instead is Simon Baker's Brian: Not only is he white, but he's blond, sports a layer of surfer-dude razor stubble, and wears an animal charm on a thong necklace (perhaps a bit of white-boy overkill on the part of the filmmakers, but Baker still manages to survive the role admirably). Embarrassed to be seen with him, Kenya begins flouncing around the cafe, trying desperately to up her "blackness" quotient by complimenting one of the patrons on her dreadlocks. And she's rude to Brian almost to the point of cruelty. But their paths cross again: She's just bought a house, and her overgrown backyard needs help. Brian is a landscape architect and, because he's the most good-natured, well-balanced, easygoing type of white guy around, he agrees to take the job.

Next page: "Hey, the white guy is really nice"