‘White Chicks’ gives chance to laugh
I asked a Caucasian girlfriend if she would be offended by a movie called “White Chicks.”
“Nooo,” she replied carefully, searching my eyes for some hidden meaning. “Why should I be?”
No particular reason. It’s just that if there were a movie called “Sistah Girl,” I’d probably be lacing up my combat boots and preparing the placards, ready to march.
Oh, to be so unencumbered by the burden of race that you can accept something as silly and superficial as the new Wayans brothers movie for just what it is — entertainment.
No racist intentions. No malicious motives. Just entertainment.
As one black pal lamented: “Must we always leave the house carrying a cross on our backs?”
Sadly, many blacks do, and understandably so. Cross-carrying comes from a long, painful history of racism, even in the arts.
It wasn’t too long ago that the only black actors you saw on screen played overprotective maids or other underlings, bowing and scraping and offering themselves up as comic relief. “Coonery and buffoonery” is how filmmaker Spike Lee describes it.
Nowadays, Hollywood often puts black actors in the role of noble, mystical sage — a type created purposely to elevate the white star. Think Morgan Freeman in “Driving Miss Daisy,” Michael Clarke Duncan in “The Green Mile” and Whoopi Goldberg in just about anything.
What’s different now is that there is a range of films that portray blacks as they are in real life, varied and textured. Which means that, finally, black audiences can enjoy funny black characters without worrying whether whites will think all blacks are “that way.”
You know what you’re getting with a Wayans brothers movie. After 16 years of creating such cinematic gems as “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” and “Scary Movie,” plus the funny, provocative TV show “In Living Color,” it’s pretty clear that Marlon, Shawn, Damon and Keenen Ivory don’t do Shakespeare. Their thing is farce — slapstick, gross-out comedy that appeals to the goofball in all of us and offends everyone equally.
In “White Chicks,” Shawn and Marlon play FBI agents who — in a flip of the blackface script — go undercover in whiteface to pass themselves off as blond socialites Tiffany and Brittany Wilson.
Along the way, they poke fun at all kinds of stereotypes, walking right up to the border between comedy and cruelty without crossing the line.
No one escapes the Wayans’ barbs. Not cigar-chomping, crucifix-wearing Latinos, not neck-working black chicks, not studly black jocks who crave white women — not even David Gest’s ex-wife.
“I am so (upset),” Marlon, as Tiffany, whines vulgarly while looking at her botched eyebrow arch. “I told her to make me look like J.Lo, and that Russian toad made me look like Liza Minnelli!”
The temptation would be to lump “White Chicks” in with the recent Snoop Dogg-piloted spoof “Soul Plane.” But while “Chicks” works with a funnier script that spotlights the Wayanses’ physical talents, “Plane” crash-lands by playing to every crude black stereotype it can squeeze into 87 minutes.
“Soul Plane” gratuitously tosses the n-word around like a used beanbag. “White Chicks” also uses the word, rarely, but in a smarter way. No one gets to say it except Tiffany and Brittany, who, as we know, are actually black guys. And because the audience is in on the joke, it gives us all permission to laugh.
If a measure of how far we’ve come is the ability to laugh at ourselves, then let’s go ahead. We deserve to.