Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, that corny, earnest comedy of racial tolerance from 1967, has been remade as a domestic farce, with the roles reversed. This time, in Guess Who (dinner having been replaced by an entire weekend), the crusty, suspicious father who must overcome his prejudices is black (Bernie Mac), while his daughter's fiance (originally a doctor played by Sidney Poitier, now a stockbroker played by Ashton Kutcher) is white. Is the new version evidence of social progress or of cultural decline?
A bit of both, perhaps. On the side of progress, it seems that the racial hang-ups and pieties that made Guess Who's Coming to Dinner both necessary and wincingly stiff have relaxed, and that interracial love is not the big deal it used to be. As for cultural decline, well, the name Ashton Kutcher is pretty much a synonym for it.
But it is hard to get very upset about this remake. For one thing, the first movie, important though it may have been, was not all that great. And for another, Guess Who, directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan (Barbershop 2) from a screenplay credited to David Ronn, Jay Scherick and Peter Tolan, is so mild and thin that it doesn't inspire much of a reaction at all.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
With one exception -- a dinner table scene that is by far the most memorable in the movie -- the racial humor is studiously unprovocative. Other avenues of comedy (the differences between men and women, the sexuality of party planners, the humorous effects of alcohol) are dutifully traveled, not imaginatively explored.
What is left -- the potentially interesting, mostly squandered premise that probably caused the picture to be greenlighted in the first place -- is a cross-racial buddy comedy based on the confrontation between Mac's bearish truculence and Kutcher's loose, spazzy amiability. The two performers do their best, but the writing is so tired and the direction so slack that their collisions never acquire much momentum or spark. They are quick and nimble comic actors in the movie, which for the most part strands them in a lumbering sequence of slackly paced, predictable scenes.
Mac's character, Percy Jones (most people in the film, including his immediate family, use both names), is a New Jersey loan officer about to renew his vows with Marilyn, his wife of 25 years (Judith Scott). Percy's older daughter, Theresa (Zoe Saldana), is coming from New York with her boyfriend, Simon (Kutcher). Theresa has neglected to inform her family that Simon is white, and he has not told her that he just quit his job at a prestigious investment bank. Those two omissions provide fuel for the misunderstandings to come, which culminate in the usual relationship-threatening recriminations followed, in the nick of time, by reconciliation.
As he did in Just Married, Kutcher plays a friendly young man attached to an intensely attractive woman and prevented by circumstances from sleeping with her. In this case, it is Percy Jones's stern, patriarchal attitude that keeps the lovers apart, as he winds up sharing a bed in the basement with his would-be son-in-law to protect his daughter's honor.
Simon, who grew up without a father (one of the film's subtler reversals of stereotype), may be exasperated by Percy's bullying, but he also respects the older man's devotion. The bullying, though not as sadistic as Robert De Niro's treatment of Ben Stiller in Meet the Parents, is nonetheless pretty constant. It reaches a peak in that dinner table moment in which Percy goads Simon into telling racist jokes, goading him to cross the line and then taking offense when he does.
The rest of Guess Who is not nearly so reckless, but its blandness has less to do with caution than with comfort. In its easy, affluent setting, what prejudices remain can be shrugged and laughed off. Guess Who suggests, convincingly enough, that race relations (to use a quaint-sounding term) have gotten a lot better since 1967, which may be one of the reasons this movie is so much worse than its predecessor.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
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