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We will allow that membership in the $20 Million Club doesn't mean as much to an actor as it used to. Time was that only stars that were definite, unassailable box-office insurance -- like Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson -- made it into the club, but at some point, the formula got all shot to hell. (Secretly, we suspect it was right around the time that Demi Moore got paid $20 million for Striptease.) Even so, we feel it's good for the industry that there are now club members who don't fit the white male mold -- like Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, and our subject today, Will Smith.
For the sake of future non-white thespians (especially Martin Lawrence and Chris Tucker, who followed directly on Smith's heels), it's great that Will Smith has been able to make such impressive financial strides. It's just a shame he's had to do so at the expense of the moviegoing audience, who have had the misfortune of having to endure his cinematic efforts. Well...fine. They haven't been all bad. At the start of his acting career, Smith wisely confined his work to comedies. Considering that his pre-screen job was novelty rapper (and who among us can forget where we were the first time we heard "Parents Just Don't Understand"?), a switch to comedy acting was pretty much a lateral move. He was quite likable in his TV series, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He was charming and surprisingly assured in the film adaptation of Six Degrees of Separation. (He was probably fine in Made in America -- a film mostly remembered as the fruit of the love affair between Ted Danson and Whoopi Goldberg -- but we haven't seen it, and don't know anyone who has that we could ask.)
Smith first hooked up with Jerry Bruckheimer in 1995, starring with Martin Lawrence in Bad Boys, a buddy-cop action comedy affair. You could say it was another sensible, lateral move from comedy: Smith was charismatic, attractive, and in good physical condition; it was only a matter of time before he ended up a wisecracking, gun-toting leading-man action hero. It's a role he's gone on to play, with great success, in movies like Independence Day, Men in Black, and Enemy of the State.
At some point, Smith decided to make a non-lateral move -- from action/comedy to drama. And here we must interject to note that jumping back and forth between comedy and drama is not something that Hollywood likes its black leading men to do. The powers that be have come far enough to allow black leading men to earn the same high salaries white actors command, but only if they're safely compartmentalized as dramatic stars in the Noble Black Man mold (for instance, Denzel Washington), or comedic stars of the Hyperactive, Motormouthed Freak type (like Eddie Murphy). Cuba Gooding Jr. has attempted to bounce back and forth...and that may be why his latest movie is Snow Dogs. African-American character actors -- like Don Cheadle, Delroy Lindo, Bill Nunn, and others -- can and do pop up in all genres of film, but not so leading men. Washington used to play comedic roles, but that was before he started getting nominated for (and winning) Oscars. The closest Eddie Murphy has ever been to a dramatic role was the 1997 flop Metro. The freedom of a white leading man -- Tom Hanks, say -- to follow a Saving Private Ryan with a You've Got Mail has yet to be afforded to leading men of colour.
Will Smith, however, has bucked the conventional wisdom and made the transition to drama. How's it going for him? Depends who you ask. Unluckily for him, the release of The Legend of Bagger Vance was delayed for several months, for reasons that probably didn't have much to do with Smith personally; also unluckily for Smith, the movie ended up being something of a lightning rod for negative public attention as the peg for countless pop-culture columns complaining about the emerging trend of the "magical black man" in movies. We don't think this is Smith's fault -- he didn't write or direct it, after all -- but it didn't do much good for Smith's image as an actor.
Ali, Smith's latest, didn't come out for nearly another year. What effect his performance in the film's title role will have on his future as an actor obviously has yet to be seen, and how well Smith acquits himself in it, again, depends who you ask. He has received a Golden Globe nomination for it, but so have Billy Bob Thornton (for Bandits) and Hugh Jackman (for Kate and Leopold), so that's not saying much. The opinion of this commentator is that, as Ali, Smith does a fine job in scenes that showcase the boxer's style, charisma, bluster, and wit, which stands to reason, since Smith's strengths as a performer are clustered around that particular skill set. In scenes that are meant to be more serious, Smith is less assured; the movie unfortunately makes it clear that Smith is incapable of "communicating" an "emotional" state through "acting." Frankly, we think it would have been a very different (in the sense of better) film had it starred the far superior Jeffrey Wright (who co-stars as photographer Howard Bingham), but at the same time we concede that if Wright had starred, the movie would have had to be an independent art-house production; there are only so many African-American actors who have enough box-office draw to carry a big-budget movie, and Denzel Washington is too old. (Plus he already played the titular boxer in an Oscar-begging movie just two years ago.) For better or for worse (mostly worse), no one but Will Smith could have played Ali in Ali -- that is, in a film of this scope and with a major studio and serious marketing budget behind it.
Will Smith is that famous -- famous enough for a studio to gamble a movie like Ali on his name alone, since they certainly didn't gamble it on the critical acclaim he'd racked up as an actor. Smith's box-office track record is pretty solid; with the exception of Wild Wild West -- the twenty-first century's answer to Ishtar -- they've all been hits. That Smith is starring in the Men in Black sequel proves that he knows what works. But Ali...Ali is worrisome. Once a career takes a turn toward Oscar-begging that blatant, it's hard to be satisfied with silly action comedies, as Jim Carrey can attest.
We think Smith is about as famous as he should be, but we make that determination with a caveat: he needs a better sense of his limitations, both as an actor, and as a star. Like Julia Roberts -- who flopped in dour period pieces like Mary Reilly and Michael Collins before growing out her hair and smiling again and finding herself back to the top of her game -- Will Smith needs to realize that we don't want to see him straining to be serious in another Ali; we want to see him quipping and shooting bad guys in another Bad Boys. Granted, it may not meet all his needs as an artist for him to keep returning to the same kinds of roles that made him famous, but that's why it's called show business and not show fulfillment.
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