Black or White

The road to hell is paved with remains of DVDs of well-intentioned movies. Add Mike Binder’s Black or White to that pile — a movie that wants to have a discussion about race but is too prone to wrongheadedness, melodrama and schmaltz to truly say anything. This is no surprise when you remember that director Binder was the man behind Reign Over Me (2007), a movie that just screamed importance and the desire to be taken very seriously but could never rise above the level of mediocre diversion. Black or White is similar in a lot of ways. It explores an important topic — race relations — but doesn’t really know what it wants to say. And when it tries to, I’m not sure that the voice to say it — a well-to-do alcoholic lawyer played by Kevin Costner — is the one to be doing it.

Costner plays Elliott, a recent widower who — with his late wife — has taken care of his granddaughter Eloise (Jillian Estell) since her birth, when his daughter died in labor. The machinations behind this are a bit complex, since his daughter hid her pregnancy from her parents (something they’re convinced led to complications during birth) because she was 17 at the time, and the child’s father was 23-year-old black drug addict Reggie (André Holland, 42)  from South Central LA, far afield from Elliott’s affluent neighborhood.

With the death of Elliott’s wife and Eloise’s biological father long out of the picture, Reggie’s mother Rowena (Octavia Spencer) decides that Elliott, with his drinking problem, often angry demeanor and heavy work schedule, isn’t fit to raise the child by himself. At the same time, she also fears the child will lose part of her heritage — believing that Elliott’s poor opinion of her son has skewed his opinion of black people. To solve this, she hires her other son (Anthony Mackie), himself a successful lawyer, to sue for custody.

The film never really gets much deeper than a “why can’t we all get along?” attitude that unfortunately veers more towards the opinion that — as far as black people go — there’s “good ones” and “bad ones.” We have Rowena, who’s raised a steady, tight-knit family that’s sullied by one bad apple, Reggie. It never truly examines class, race and drug use, for instance. The film calls itself Black or White because it believes it’s operating in the middle ground (and because Binder has a tendency to lazily title movies after pop songs), but it’s not truly existing within the gray area it thinks it is. Without getting into spoilers, this becomes apparent in the film’s climax, which conveniently removes any moral complexity from the film while also being totally and — thanks to an appearance by the ghost of Elliott’s wife in Chekhov’s swimming pool — unintentionally funny. That the film wraps up with such a goofy, melodramatic concept shows just how lightweight the whole thing truly is. Rated PG-13 on appeal for brief strong language, thematic material involving drug use and drinking and for a fight.