Earlier this year, when Ifound myself assigned to jury duty on a drug-related trial at Los Angeles Superior Court, our jury foreman turned out to be a blond, blue-eyed, protein-shake-guzzling reality-TV producer from the bedroom community of Altadena. During the jury-selection process, when the judge asked if he had any particular positive or negative feelings about the police, the producer responded that he was very pleased with the work of the LAPD, which had helped to rid his neighborhood of some unsavory characters prone to “smoking marijuana and listening to hip-hop” at unconscionable hours of the day and night. This, in turn, elicited rolled eyes and an audible huff from a young African-American man also seated in the jury box. Lakeview Terrace is a movie that lives in such moments.
Chuck Zlotnick
Your enemies and neighbors
Related Content
More About
At first glance, it may puzzle followers of dramatist and occasional filmmaker Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, The Shape of Things) that the American stage’s crown prince of psychosexual power plays and the postcoital mind fuck has opted to follow his universally mocked 2006 remake of The Wicker Manby working as a director for hire on a yuppies-in-peril thriller that seems about two decades past its freshness date. But peer beneath Lakeview Terrace’s lurid exploitation-movie surface and you will find a vintage LaBute proposition — a taut three-hander that explores the space between surface appearances and realities, between what people say and what they really think. Set in the titular San Fernando Valley suburb — the one where Rodney King was assaulted by police in 1991 — the movie is about the troubles that arise when a newlywed interracial couple moves in next door to a widower African-American cop with three decades of service under his belt. There goes the neighborhood.
Lakeview Terracebegins with a shrewd moving-in scene, during which LAPD officer Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson) glances out his window over the septic tank at the new arrivals and briefly mistakes Chris Mattson (Patrick Wilson), the jocular white husband of Lisa (Kerry Washington), an alluring, well-dressed black woman, for one of the movers. A bit later, they meet-cute in the driveway — Mattson smoking a covert cigarette behind the wife’s back while rap music blares from his iPod, until Turner taps on his car window, flashlight in hand. “You can listen to that noise all night long, but when you wake up in the morning you’ll still be white,” the cop says before uttering a forced chuckle.
Things only get more Pacific Heightsfrom there: Turner’s megawatt security lights illuminate the Mattson bedroom like a football field; air-conditioner wires are not-so-mysteriously cut in the dead of summer; tires are slashed. When someone breaks into the young couple’s garage in the middle of the night, Mattson arms himself with his college lacrosse stick before running downstairs to investigate. Can you get any whiter than that?
Because it’s being marketed as a run-of-the-mill psycho-cop romp, Lakeview Terracewill likely be judged by many critics and audiences exclusively on those terms. And as a suspense picture, it’s merely ho-hum, LaBute being the sort of director, like his fellow playwright-filmmaker David Mamet, who possesses only the most rudimentary know-how about the tools of cinema. (When he reallywants to emphasize something, he cuts to a close-up and adds a musical sting on the soundtrack.) But like a lot of better genre fare, Lakeview Terraceuses its predictable premise to mount a stealth attack on the audience’s sensibilities. Written by David Loughery and Howard Korder, this may be the perfect movie for the political moment, in that it’s about people’s latent prejudices — the ones they don’t admit to in mixed company, or perhaps even acknowledge to themselves but which can follow them into the voting booth. Wilson, in particular, is very good as the Chicago native who went to Stanford on an athletic scholarship and, despite fancying himself an open-minded liberal, carries himself with an air of smug WASP privilege. He moves across the screen with the blissful self-confidence of someone who’s never known what it means to be glared upon with innate suspicion. Watching him, we understand how an Abel Turner might take umbrage.
Lakeview Terracenever quite realizes when enough is enough, weighing down the narrative with an overly symbolic brushfire that threatens our picture-postcard suburbia, giving Jackson’s character a wholly unnecessary back story, and culminating in an over-the-top finale full of ethereal light and crucifixion poses. But along the way, it’s one of those rare American movies about race in which things aren’t black or white but only shades of gray. Rather deftly, Lakeview Terrace even gives us a car crash or two, though they don’t bring any of the movie’s characters closer to a shared understanding. Can’t we all just get along? LaBute doesn’t deign to pretend that he knows the answer.
LAKEVIEW TERRACE | Directed by NEIL LABUTE | Wirtten by DAVID LOUGHERY and HOWARD KORDER, based on a story by LOUGHERY | Produced by JAMES LASSITER and WILL SMITH | Released by Screen Gems | Citywide
