Denzel Washington’s film debut is a
sporadically fascinating object of study, at times a biting satire of complacent
white attitudes toward race and at others an underwhelming, dubiously conceived
studio product; it’s perhaps most interesting when making it hard to separate
one from the other. George Segal plays Walter Whitney, trapped in a stagnant marriage,
occupying a lucrative but unrewarding executive position for his wife’s father,
Nelson Longhurst; his life is suddenly shaken up by the arrival of Washington’s
character Roger, the son he never knew he had from the fondly remembered
relationship he sacrificed to get ahead. Rapidly assuming at least some sense
of responsibility, he tries to bring Roger – seemingly a barely literate
high-school drop-out - into his life, succeeding only in rapidly finding
himself a penniless pariah, living with Roger in a wretched apartment and
getting by on manual day jobs. The intention seems to have been to make a
madcap scorched earth comedy (for instance, Dick Martin plays Walter’s lawyer
as a dope-smoking screwball) but notwithstanding a few sharp lines, it’s
generally paced too slowly and blandly, with Segal seeming disappointingly
disengaged. The film explicitly analyzes Walter’s downfall as a symptom of pure
bigotry (in an environment which has plenty of it to go around – we learn that “Whitney”
was a replacement for his original Jewish surname); Longhurst’s insistence that
privileged white people constitute the true embattled minority looks ahead to
our current era of narcissistically self-justifying ruling class privilege. The
film’s ending fairly deftly repositions our sense of Roger, allowing the
audience as well as Walter a passable sense of growth. But even if you award
the film a passing grade on racial matters, the sexual politics are hard to
redeem, with the wife (played by Susan Saint James) an unredeemable mishmash of ugly
characteristics (albeit that we can read her as another victim of Longhurst’s
stifling worldview and desire for control).
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