SOMETHING NEW

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Nothing New

Newcomers Fumble Romantic Race Relations
By Cole Smithey

In the past, films about interracial love have been few and far between. Last year’s update on "Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner" did a reversal on Stanley Kramer’s 1967 original so that a young black woman brought her white fiancé home for some cross-cultural immersion.

Neophyte director Sanaa Hamri and first-time screenwriter Kriss Turner grapple with an interracial love affair in formulaic terms that undermine their heartfelt attempt at voicing stereotypes, opinions, and problems associated with dating outside racial barriers.

"Something New" is a tentative baby step toward a hopefully improving cinematic dialogue about the fact of interracial relations and their acceptance in our society.

Senior accounting executive Kenya McQueen (Sanaa Lathan) is in danger of being a permanent bachelorette due to her rigorous work schedule and her long list of prerequisites for the man of her dreams. Not only is Kenya uptight beyond belief, but she’s also so insecure about representing her imagined image of an African American woman that she performs social backflips when her blind date Brian Kelly (Simon Baker) turns out to be white.

In one of the film’s funniest and most revealing scenes, Kenya self-consciously begins to sabotage the date by ingratiating herself to black patrons in the café where the pair meet. She brings up Michael Jordan to a busboy and compliments a woman on the way she wears her dreadlocks. Brian is quick to diffuse Kenya’s self-destruct mode by calling her on her embarrassing attempt to apologize for his presence and prove that she’s "down with her peeps." But by now the damage is done and Kenya begs off of the date to Brian’s amused dismay.

One of the film’s biggest stumbling blocks is the dynamic set up between Kenya and Brian. Even by her friends’ standards Kenya is a piece of work. She allows her insecurities to prop up the chip she carries on her shoulder even with a bigoted white client at the firm where she is about to be made partner. A chance social function brings Brian to Kenya’s attention yet again--this time as a talented landscape architect.

The two begin a business relationship wherein Brian rejuvenates the overgrown back yard of Kenya’s new house into a lavish garden. During this dubious courtship, Kenya rudely states her superior financial status to Brian over glasses of wine. The insult is just one of many that Brian suffers in the course of wooing a woman who berates him more harshly than her friends and family do whenever they meet him.

For all of Brian’s steely good looks and saintly behavior, his character is a cardboard punching bag put there to absorb Kenya’s agenda about issues like the "black tax" that she describes as the double amount of work that black people have to perform to prove that they are equal to whites. Brian agreeably catches the grenades of social injustice that Kenya consistently lobs but he’s too mealymouthed to actually enter into the discussion with both feet.

Brian’s character is never afforded a background of friends or family in the film, so we can’t get a bearing on his social or political convictions, much less how he might have earned them. We only see Brian’s temper flare up once toward Kenya when the two are shopping at a grocery store where she makes an embarrassing example of his refusal to take on her day’s ration of racial stress.

A narrative schism occurs because Brian requests a night off from their ongoing discussion on racial inequality. The filmmakers haven’t done their due diligence in showing how the couple discusses or reconcile issues. 

For a film so intent on spelling out the alphabet of love as complicated by racial differences, "Something New" barely pronounces its second vowel before screeching into an ending that clearly spells doom for both parties. It rewards bad behavior in the name of a romantic idea with no foundation. That kind of connection can only be brief because it will never last long enough to mature.

Rated PG-13. 99 mins.