To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Arts & Entertainment April 16, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/1999/04/16/life The facts of "Life" Though it's played for laughs, Eddie Murphy's new comedy offers a dose of realism about the African-American experience. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Andrew O'Hehir Comedy, as Sigmund Freud would tell you, is complicated. "Life" may not be a great movie, but it packages hilarious performances by its two stars and a rich ensemble cast, along with fluid and capable direction by Ted Demme ("Beautiful Girls"), around a surprisingly generous spirit. Inescapably, it will be compared to Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful," and not just because they'll be listed right next to each other in Leonard Maltin's next edition. Like Benigni's film, "Life" suggests that laughter, in some cosmic long term, can defeat tyranny. More specifically, you could see "Life's" narrative of wrongful imprisonment and ultimate transcendence as an allegorical version of the African-American experience. Almost the only explicit discussion of race and racism in the entire film is in a brief but telling early scene, played entirely as comedy. It's 1932, and sly-fox petty crook Ray (Eddie Murphy) and squaresville banker Claude (Martin Lawrence) have been enlisted by a Harlem crime boss to pick up a load of bootleg liquor in Mississippi. Along the way, they blithely wander into a whites-only diner and try to convince the proprietor to sell them some "Negro pie." The joke here is about black characters refusing to accept that a racist society's norms and values have any meaning. When their spiraling bad luck lands the duo in a hard-labor prison, framed for murder by a corrupt small-town sheriff, no one ever comments on the fact that the prisoners are all black and their jailers all white. Why would they? As the African-Americans both on-screen and in the audience know perfectly well, racism is a persistent fact of American history, and in the Jim Crow South it was no more worth talking about than the heat and humidity. Thanks to the magic of makeup wizard Rick Baker, we follow manic motormouth Ray and perennial grouch Claude through 65 years of bickering, scheming and mutual recrimination, during which they never lose hope that their next stratagem will set them free. Murphy's genius for physical comedy makes him wonderful to watch as a crotchety old man, but the film is strongest during the early years, when its cast -- a virtual who's who of contemporary black comedy -- keeps the gags flowing thick and fast over a potent emotional undercurrent. Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone's screenplay, commissioned by Murphy, may not be Oscar Wilde, but it's refreshingly free of the homophobia and misogyny that marred much of the star's early work. Coming in the wake of "The Nutty Professor" and "Holy Man," "Life" makes it clear that Murphy has entered a more mature, even sweet-tempered phase of his comic career. The camp inmates -- who also include Obba Babatundé as elder statesman Willie Long and Michael "Bear" Taliferro as the fearsome Goldmouth -- swap outrageous stories about which of them committed the most heinous crime, or are swept up in Ray's bittersweet fantasies about the Boom Boom Room, his imaginary Harlem nightclub. But the point is largely that they have created their own autonomous society, limited though it may be, which all but ignores the white world. Although "Life" is certainly accessible to non-black viewers, like Murphy's animated TV series "The PJs" it is unabashedly told from inside black experience and belongs to the African-American tradition of hard-luck comedy. (Yes, Ted Demme is white; so was the director of "Black Caesar.") Camp boss Sgt. Dillard (Nick Cassavetes) is at least as much a thwarted buffoon as a sadistic goon, and the aging superintendent (Ned Beatty) who eventually becomes convinced Claude and Ray are innocent is foiled by tragicomic misadventure. There's a hilarious scene in the middle of the movie that accomplishes in miniature what "Life" tries to do as a whole. And it left me wondering, after I and the rest of a boisterous preview audience were done howling, exactly why it was funny. It's 1945, and a white superintendent, red with rage, walks down a line of black convicts, holding his cherubic mulatto grandson up next to every sweat-drenched, impassive prisoner. Tension and menace hang in the air, but the absurdity is thickening. Everyone except the superintendent knows that the baby's father is a mute convict known as Can't Get Right (Bokeem Woodbine), whose athletic talent is about to win him a ticket out of prison and into baseball's Negro Leagues. Just as the superintendent's gaze fixes on Can't Get Right, Ray steps forward and says, "It's my baby, boss." A beat later, another convict steps forward to claim paternity. Then several more men do so, including Biscuit (Miguel A. Núñez Jr.), an effeminate prisoner in a do-rag who seems an especially unlikely prospect. Finally, Jangle Leg (Bernie Mac), a burly, ominous figure with an impenetrable deep-country accent, steps off the line and growls, "I'm the pappy." In the theater, the audience exploded. On-screen, none of the men, not even Sgt. Dillard, can restrain themselves from losing it, and the superintendent is driven from the scene by hoots of derision. On one level, this is crude and perhaps slightly cruel humor -- the idea of the beautiful, ultra-feminine Mae Rose (Poppy Montgomery) knocking boots with an uncouth character like Jangle Leg is implausible and for that reason irresistible. Yet it horrifies the superintendent into flight, because, well, Mae Rose clearly does enjoy the company of black men. He can never be sure whether she enjoyed a tender romantic interlude with Can't Get Right or got nasty with Jangle Leg, Biscuit, Ray and every other man in the camp. Some of the joke's value lies in the audience's appreciation of Jangle Leg and the other men's foolhardy nobility, volunteering to face punishment in order to protect their most vulnerable companion. But most of all, the scene is powerful because these men -- poor, uneducated and trapped in a cruel and unjust situation -- fight back with the one weapon at their disposal: ridicule. The superintendent, like the society he represents, is passionately obsessed with the purity of race and the purity of womanhood. The prisoners, although apparently powerless, know these notions are ludicrous, and they refuse to take him or his pompous worldview seriously. In large part, "Life" succeeds because of its daring -- we know that Claude and Ray's predicament is far too plausible to be amusing, but we laugh anyway. It's that tang of realism underneath the genial, episodic course of the film that lends it its bite. Fans will flock to see Murphy's bad-attitude tirades and Lawrence's slow-burn double takes, and they're well worth it. But "Life" also offers a heartfelt, even inspirational message that audiences of all races should have no difficulty grasping: Even at its most abused and downtrodden, in the darkest days and worst places of the century, the African-American spirit has never been broken. salon.com | April 16, 1999