You guys remember that Falling Down movie from the early 90’s? Michael Douglas is driving home through L.A., gets stuck in a traffic jam, then goes nuts and just starts walking home and indulging in revenge for every petty problem that comes with urban living. I remember there’s one kinda funny scene where he goes to a McDonald’s or one of those to get breakfast, only to be told that they stopped serving breakfast ten minutes ago, so he has to order from the lunch menu, and then he pulls out a machine gun. Like I said, kinda funny. I always hated that fucking movie, ’cause it struck me as being profoundly dishonest take on its subject matter. The movie delights in the carnage Douglas causes, even goes out of its way to have him beat up a Nazi so we’ll stay on his side, but then it’ll cut to Robert Duvall as a cop character, delivering lectures about how bad all this is. It’s the same problem many have spotlighted on Fight Club, but without David Fincher’s visual opulence to spackle over the hatred.
I bring all this up so you’ll understand why I’m hesitant about Street Smart, new on Blu from Olive Films. While the film is plotted and played as a potboiler thriller, there’s something discomforting about the way it indulges in age-old stereotypes for its story, particularly the way the film codifies ‘black’ with ‘crime’.
Street Smart is the story of Jonathan Fisher (Christopher Reeve) the kind of hotshot celebrity reporter that exists in movies, and only in movies. Jonathan is on the verge of being fired from his magazine, and in desperation he fabricates an elaborate story about spending time with a local pimp. By complete coincidence, Fisher’s phony story has a number of points in common with an actual pimp, Fast Black (Morgan Freeman). Also coincidentally, Fast Black is awaiting trial for murder, and both he and the prosecution begin putting pressure on Fisher to get his (non-existent) notes.
I dearly, dearly wish someone, at some point, had had the idea to have Freeman and Reeves switch roles, or to at least mix up the racial construction of the cast even a little bit. As it is, there is no escaping that this is a film in which a lily-white, Harvard-educated man has his world rocked by the influx of street (read: black) people and their criminal ways. The films tosses out a few token references to the idea that Reeves, by placing a pimp in a national spotlight, is only perpetuating stereotypes and reinforcing racist beliefs, but the film can only nod at these (potentially more interesting) storylines before getting back to scenes where a black man invades a wealthy white neighborhood to knife Reeves’ girlfriend.
Freeman makes the most of Fast Black, but he’s not playing a human being. Fast Black’s entire personality is he goes from being a chatty, charming buddy to being TOTALLY FUCKING PSYCHO and then back again. It’s scary the first couple times (with one especially affecting scene involving Freeman holding a broken bottle to one his whores while Reeves watches helplessly) but by the end he’s a fairly neutered villain.
(And why did Fast Black have to be a villain anyway? The film shows that the murder he committed was an accident, and the script occasionally acknowledges that he’s a product of a system that he can never hope to transcend, even if he’s aware of it. A movie that actually contended with these matters might have had some meat, but instead they eventually have Freeman shift to playing The goddamn Joker, with elaborate murder schemes and convoluted plans.)
It gets to the point where even Reeves is calling him out for how predictable that move is.
Reeves is a different problem. Like Freeman he’s playing a character with no central spine. He seems to be positioned as a conscientious reporter, but he fabricates a story with zero hesitation or qualms (and in general this movie is SUPER chill about a reporter doing that. It’s treated as a minor lapse of ethical judgment, instead of a horrific abuse of power), and he goes on to cheat on his girlfriend with one of Fast Black’s prostitutes for no stated reason. I think Reeves may have been simply miscast. He doesn’t have the right noir face to play either the sucker or the bully. Fisher needed a seedy presence behind his blue-blood exterior, and Reeves just did not have that in him to play.
I don’t want to give the impression that Street Smart is a bad movie, because it’s not. It’s mostly fine, and is worth watching if only to see a young and hungry Morgan Freeman playing a part that is utterly alien to our modern conception of him as Mr. Dignity (in movies, anyway. Googling that dude’s personal life creates a whole different impression). And Street Smart is fairly well-constructed on the narrative level, with director Jerry Schatzberg keeping everything humming at a steady clip. It’s much, much more coherent than most of its Cannon Films brethren which were held together by hubris and cocaine.
But I couldn’t help but feel that this is a film whose time has passed. Like Falling Down or, yes, Fight Club (eat me, Project Mayhem), Street Smart is a vision of impotent white men grappling with their place in the world, and it is incapable of expressing those ideas without resorting to the ugliest of clichés and most obvious of shortcuts.
