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Until that time, though, there's plenty to admire in the story of the conflicts between Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson) and his new neighbors Chris and Lisa Mattson (Patrick Wilson & Kerry Washington). Turner is a hardnosed LAPD officer, widower and stentorian father of two who looks out his bedroom window one morning to see the Mattsons moving in. With one look at his face, it's clear that Turner disapproves of the couple's interracial union; as such, he sets out to drive them from his neighborhood.
The threats start as passive-aggresive gestures that could come off as either hostile or deadpan japery - Turner introducing himself to Chris by way of a faux-carjacking, for example - and move steadily into escalating games of power and one-upsmanship. It's in this material that you can see what attracted LaBute to the project. His other work belies a fascination with power dynamics between individuals, specifically how stronger people bully and manipulate weaker people. Race is the predominant factor, but in LaBute's hands it's merely a large thread in his tapestry of misanthropy; class, gender and political outlook also ricochet off the skin-color argument and into the fabric of the film. It's more complex than it first appears (there's a garden-party scene where Turner coldly challenges the knee-jerk liberal viewpoints of the Mattsons' guests, with sympathy being torn between the assaulted guests and Turner, the asshole who nonetheless has a point), and we can see that in the characters.
Abel is not necessarily an evil man, just a misguided one who worked hard to get where he is and has let the ruthless authority of his livelihood frame everything in his life. His way is always the right way, and everything he does is undertaken because, from his frame of reference, it is the correct thing to do and will ideally result in the best outcome for all involved parties; in the film's most illuminating sequence, he beats up a shotgun-toting perpetrator in an attempt to get the man to be a better husband and father, then seems genuinely shocked that the man files brutality charges against him. Similarly, Chris is too spiky and frazzled to be the traditional squishy leftist victim, and it's telling that the script spends as much time on the marital problems that he and Lisa are having unrelated to Turner's machinations as it does on the neighborly friction that causes the plot's wheels to move.
But at the bottom of it, the race issues carry the day. This is not the easy piety of Crash with its there-there reassurance that somehow it'll all work out. In its stronger moments, Lakeview Terrace takes on racial politics with a considerably more jaundiced eye, stating that some people just won't like you because of who you are and what you represent to them and that's real hard to change, bucko.
Too bad the narrative ends up being a slow-burn to nowhere interesting. Once Turner's actions shift from passive-aggressive to openly aggressive, the film falls apart. The trouble starts when Turner confesses to Chris why he's so bothered by interracial relationships; Jackson sells the scene to the best of his considerable abilities, but having such reasoning at all smacks of reductive pop-psych twaddle, and it weakens the film's considerable bite. From there is a descent as steep at the flaming hills that serve as the script's constant backdrop/handy metaphor. Abel mutates from a recognizable human being into a stock psycho, Chris becomes the Michael-Douglas-style Beleaguered White Man, and Lisa descends to damsel-in-distress status.
All of this culminates in a perfunctory rough-n-tumble action climax complete with psychological standoff, which is something anyone could have made. The meat of the film demands an emotional epiphany a la Do the Right Thing; instead, we get Unlawful Entry II: The Miscegenation. Lakeview Terrace is a perfectly acceptable thriller. But it could have been something better.
- Steve Carlson (0 comments)