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Octavia Spencer and Anthony Mackie are family who fight for Eloise to be raised by the African American branch of her kin.
Photo Tracy Bennett / Associated PressHer black family and her white family joust for custody of Eloise (Jillian Estell left) with Kevin Costner as her grandpa.
Photo Tracy Bennett / Associated PressThe little girl is adorable and two sides of the family are fighting over her in Black or White. On one side there s the newly widowed maternal grandfather (Kevin Costner) who raised the girl all her life. On the other there s the paternal grandmother (Octavia Spencer) who wants the girl to grow up around her and her extended family.
One of these days it may be possible to make a movie about a dispute between white characters and black characters that s just about people in dispute. It might even be possible right now and someone ought to try it. But Black or White even by its title invites audiences to see it as a film about race. This puts too much pressure on the story and limits where it can go.
To put it simply people may be right and people may be wrong but there are no right races or wrong races. A writer director who chooses to have characters representing race and not themselves alone paints himself into a corner in which everyone in the movie absolutely must come out all right.
Still working within these self imposed limits writer director Mike Binder does some interesting things and casts the movie well. For the child Eloise he finds a little movie star in Jillian Estell who is warm and already a good actress and precocious without being bratty.
Costner by his very nature has an aura of decency and integrity and while Binder doesn t have Costner play against that he gives him some rough edges. Elliot has a hard to control temper not with Eloise but with everyone else and he is developing a drinking problem. Actually he has two drinking problems He s drinking heavily and he s drinking the wrong Scotch.
Costner s portrayal of drunkenness is technically brilliant right up with the very best. Costner remembers what others often forget that when people are drunk they re usually doing their best to conceal it. When they re exposed it s almost always through cracks in the facade rarely by a wholesale crumbling. Costner also conveys varying degrees of drunkenness for different scenes with such clarity that I can t begin to figure how he did it.
In the role of Rowena Elliot s opponent in the custody fight Octavia Spencer pushes at the constraints of her usual likable persona. She s a self made woman the matriarch and support of two households but she s a difficult personality driven by impulses she s not entirely aware of. Rowena tells Elliot that she believes that Eloise needs to be around her people but as played by Spencer and hinted at in Binder s script her deeper motive might be to rescue her drug addicted son.
Black or White is such a mix of smart and tin eared choices that you can love or hate the movie depending on what you choose to notice. It has for example songs on the soundtrack that are glaring in their inappropriateness. At one point Costner is driving down the road in a contemplative mood and the soundtrack is playing Billy Joel s Don t Ask Me Why. (Why Don t ask.) In another scene Binder chooses a moment of introspection to resurrect the 1976 hit Misty Blue. Speaking of unwelcome resurrections Jennifer Ehle keeps showing up in visions as the deceased wife smiling in that peaceful loving so happy to be dead way that we all know from bad movies.
On the other hand it s hard not to like a picture that casts comedian Bill Burr as Costner s law partner lets him act in dramatic scenes and yet every so often throws him a funny line. Paula Newsome as a judge similarly benefits from lots of amusing and playable moments in what could have been a bland role. It also should be noted that at no point does Costner get choked up and make a speech about how much he loves everybody. Black or White could have been that kind of movie but it s not.
Eventually what tips Black and White ever so slightly into the losing column is the resolution which is rushed and far fetched. Still the movie is appealing enough to make you want to believe it even when you don t.
Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle s movie critic. E mail mlasalle sfchronicle.com. Twitter MickLaSalle
Black or White
Drama. Starring Kevin Costner Octavia Spencer and Gillian Jacobs. Directed by Mike Binder. (PG 13. 121 minutes.)
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