Melora Hardin in Soul Man (1986)

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Junior and I have made fun of this film so many times that I suppose it's time to discuss it in some more depth.

Racism can be a subject for comedy, in the sense that anything is a subject for comedy. It has inspired some pretty good comedy movies like Bamboozled, and some great ones, like ~Blazing Saddles~. But it presents very thin comedy ice, because it is not simple for people to distinguish between what you are, what you pretend to be, and what you are satirizing. If you draw blatant racial stereotypes to show how the racist mind works, you risk being accused of having drawn those stereotypes out of your own perceptions. If you try to portray the racists as morons, you risk creating racism in the other direction.

~Soul Man~, a film about a white kid (C. Thomas Ponyboy Howell) who poses as a black in order to obtain a minority scholarship, fell into every trap.

• If it is supposed to be against racism, then why does it include scenes like the following:

When the white kid finally reveals his true colors, so to speak, we see some guys think "no wonder he sucks at basketball", and we see a white woman think "no wonder he has a small dick".

• If it is supposed to promote better understanding of the issues, then why does it portray almost white character as a simple-minded racist buffoon, and every black character as noble, intelligent, compassionate, possessing unlimited integrity and eternally forgiving?

• I found one scene really embarassing - a scene where the star tries to disguise himself from some white high school friends by donning sunglasses and impersonating the head movements that Stevie Wonder makes when he's singing.

I think if you want to approach something like this in a comedy, you either have to make the film uncompromisingly honest and raw, or you have to take all of the characters and situations to completely illogical comic extremes (like the rednecks in ~Blazing Saddles~ saving the pushcart from the quicksand instead of saving the black guys).

This premise could have been a rich mine for genuine humor, if the screenwriter had simply thought it out and researched it. If I were going to do this film, I would approach it as follows:

1. Hire the funniest black people I can find to be my co-writers. Mel Brooks hired Richard Pryor to help him write ~Blazing Saddles~.

2. Combine their perception of how white people talk to them with my own perceptions of how white people talk to one another about black people (something which would add an extra layer).

3. Try to think through the actual responses that the character would get. This particular guy would have drawn out some ugliness from white crackers, to be sure, and some condescension from white liberals, but he also would have drawn some fire from black people who thought he was an Oreo or a house man. Try to draw the humor from real material, and keep the asshole proportion sensible among all groups.

There were some moments in the film that might have had the right idea. At one point, the guy was dating a rich white woman, and the film showed us how he looked in her racist father's eyes (basically like cross between Huggy Bear and Mike Tyson). That was reasonably funny, and totally over-the-top. If the whole film had gone that way, cutting in people's thoughts like "Dream On" cuts in the film clips, it might have been funny, but even that moment didn't really work in this context, because it was so far out of the tone of the rest of the film.

The big comic set piece was a scene in which a nympho white woman planted herself in his bedroom, while his black girlfriend was in the kitchen, and his parents were being juggled through the apartment. So he had to hide his color from his parents, hide the white girl from his girlfriend, and explain to his girlfriend why the white people kept pretending to be his parents, all while he was wearing a ski mask and gloves so that he could move from one group to another. It was one of those scenes where the one door closes just as the other one opens, and ....

Well, you get the picture. Nothin' racist about that. It's just dumb.

At the end of the film, everyone spouts all the pious liberal platitudes, and we learn that everything will be all right. His blatant embezzlement is forgiven, and even his black girlfriend forgives him for what he did. (Remember now, he didn't just walk around in black face, but he was also cheating on her with a white nymphomaniac. Now that's forgiveness! That one might even have persuaded Jesus to by-pass the whole "turn the other cheek" principle, but Rae Dawn was back in love in about 20 seconds.)

It isn't so much a bad movie as just a trivial one. It takes a silly ~Laverne and Shirley~ french-sex-farce attitude toward a topic that deserved a less cavalier approach. The result was that it's the kind of movie that is just kind of embarrassing. I didn't think it so much offensive as just clueless. Interestingly, it made a lot of money for New World Pictures.

By the way, the writer never sold another movie script, according to IMDb, having switched to sitcoms where she clearly belonged. The director, Steve Miner, was not so easily deterred from future failures. He went on to do the notorious Tom Arnold film ~Big Bully~, and his curse continues to this day. Last December he unleashed the James Van Der Beek financial disaster, ~Texas Rangers~, on an unprepared world. "Rangers" cost the studio $38 million dollars and did virtually nothing at the box.

Critics Vote: Ebert 1/4.

IMDB Summary: IMDb voters score it 4.8/10. There are some positive comments at IMDb from people who found it cute.

Box Office: It was a success, with $28 million in domestic gross, off a $5 million budget.

DVD Info: widescreen 1.85:1. Full length commentary by Howell and the director.


Written by: Scoopy …courtesy of Scoopy.net