"SHADOWBOXER"
TAKES A STAB AT THE INCONGRUITIES OF LOVE
By
Erica Hector Vital
Red Rock Review
Las Vegas Round The Clock
http://www.lasvegasroundtheclock.com
ericavital@cox.net
ericav@theflickchicks.com
ericav@lasvegasroundtheclock.com
The Shadowboxer
Directed by: Lee Daniels
Written by: Willam Lipz
The Shadowboxer
Takes a Stab at the Incongruities of Love
It was as a producer that Lee Daniels brought the brutal melodrama of
Monster’s Ball to the screen. The film paired two souls on opposite sides of
small town America’s racial divide as starlet of color Halle Berry played
the black single mother beset by unspeakable tragedy to Billy Bob Thornton’s
stony, white prison guard whose heart beneath the Teflon veneer had been
tendered by tragedy of his own. What made Monster’s Ball, and yet another
Daniels produced film, The Woodsman, so sensational to watch was the fact
that both films brought us moments that were hard to bear. THE SHADOWBOXER
is the two-time producer’s directorial debut. The film continues in the
Daniels-onian tradition of giving us tales that are indeed hard to watch and
often too much to bear, yet too good to turn away from.
Along with an esoteric
sense of story, Daniels’ strength is in his willingness to go beyond
Hollywood pairings of patently beautiful people. As a director and producer,
it’s clear Daniels’ mission is to show-n-prove that love and the violence,
disillusion and subsequent discovery that can come with it, is rawer than a
Gap ad, more fevered and complex than the slick exteriors of two pretty
people locking lips could possibly convey. Love itself, Daniels tells us in
every frame, can be brutish, bitter, hard to explain or contain.
Therefore,THE SHADOWBOXER, is not only layered with moments of cruelty and
grace, it is also populated by alarmingly odd couples.
Vanessa Felito is
Vickie, a nice girl, soon to be a mother, yoked by the velvet rope of
privilege to a pyschopathic thug. Stephen Dorff is the thug – hedonistic,
sadistic and murderous. Joseph Gordo-Levitt is a skinny white boy physician
and flawlessly phat black comedienne Mo’Nique is his girl. And in a pairing
that has been used once or twice before on screen – but never quite this
passionatley – Helen Mirren is Rose, a cultured assassin to Cuba Gooding,
Jr.’s, silent and focussed, Mikey, a hitman who takes the business for what
it is, just business.
The configuration of Gooding, Jr. and Mirren throws in the added
scintillation of race, class, nationality (Mirren is British, a Dame to
boot), along with age. And it works. The complexity suits both Gooding and
Mirren well.
Cuba Gooding Jr. hasn’t
looked so flagrantly sexed up, macho and haunted since Boys In the Hood and
Jerry MacQuire; and Mirren, many years his senior, matches Gooding glance
for glance in seduction and hard-heartedness as a woman assassin who comes
face to face with her own mortality only to find repentance in delaying the
hit of Vanessa Ferlito’s Vickie.
Daniels’ pace as a director is leisurely one moment, taut and bloody the
next. His influences are deft and over the top dramatists like himself –
Coppola, Bill Duke and DePalma. An idyllic, dreamlike moment in a glade
between Mirren and Gooding is straight out of Boorman and the 1981
Brit-fantasy classic, Excaliber, in which Helen Mirren starred as Morgana,
the incestuous sister-lover to King Arthur.
THE SHADOWBOXER is
modern film-noir, textured and oftentimes deep. The film’s rewards come, not
from the sensationalist moments of passion between mixed couples, but in the
raw honesty of the passion, fear, and incorrigible nature beneath the
mix.There is in Gooding, Mirren, Dorff and Ferlito’s performances the
ferocity of the ego, the inescapable capacity to be cruel, loving and
achingly violent that are universally compelling.
