Funny Like Me

GUESS WHO

Directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan

PEEP SHOW

Directed by J.X. WILLIAMS

The Guess Who's Coming to Dinner remake Guess Who isn't smashing entertainment, much less art. But it's a funny, sentimental movie about husbands, wives, parents and children, held together by smart dialogue, graceful comic acting and a palpable love of people. Though dismissed by critics, it's the kind of film that paying moviegoers will love enough to see twice.

Stanley Kramer's 1967 original revolved around a well-off white couple (Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) whose supposed tolerance was tested when their grown daughter brought home a black fiancé. That the fiancé was a dashing Nobel prizewinner played by Sidney Poitier prompted hipster snickering that continues to this day. The charges of soft-pedaling and sermonizing had weight-Kramer was noble but not subtle. Yet detractors missed Kramer's larger, still-valid point: Social mores were changing more slowly than progressives wished.

Where the original was a combination love story and message picture-and a drama at heart-director Kevin Rodney Sullivan and a trio of screenwriters have re-imagined it as a knockabout comedy in the vein of Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers (both of which borrowed heavily from Kramer's film). Now the races have been switched so that the prospective fiancé, Simon Green (Ashton Kutcher's young investment banker) is white and the dad is a dyspeptic black loan officer, Percy Jones (the great Bernie Mac), who wishes his adoring daughter, Theresa (Zoe Saldana), would date her own kind. "We taught our daughter to see people, not color," says Theresa's mom, Marilyn (Judith Scott). But that's no consolation to Percy, who so badly wants Theresa to marry a black man that he lies to a coworker and says Theresa's new boyfriend is a former basketball player and Howard graduate who's friends with the Cosbys.

Guess Who lightens the tone of Kramer's film and downgrades race from central issue to margin note. But that's not a cop-out, it's a valid artistic decision that concedes American attitudes have advanced since 1967. Complaining that Guess Who is insufficiently interested in race (the preferred critical adjective is "timid") reveals an ignorance of contemporary life. A more race-centered movie would have seemed bizarrely unrealistic. Racism exists and interracial couples have to deal with it, but they don't spend every waking moment fleeing the hellhounds of bigotry. Sullivan's movie is as concerned with these matters as most Americans-i.e., not very.

In place of angst and sermonizing, the movie offers arbitrary plot complications (every major character tells at least one big lie about something) and dumbass slapstick (including a go-cart grudge race between Percy and Simon, and Percy's protecting his daughter's virtue by relocating Simon to the basement rec room and sharing his fold-out bed). That's predictable even though the bits are pretty funny (a dinner-table scene where Percy baits Simon into embarrassing the room with black jokes is the realest, most uncomfortable scene in the movie; ironically, but not surprisingly, it's the scene critics are most likely to single out as disingenuous or unbelievable).

But the dialogue and acting compensate. Scene for scene, Guess Who is much subtler than either of the Meet movies; it uses a tack-hammer rather than a sledgehammer. The laughs come not from gross-outs and humiliations but moments of shared humanity. When Marilyn reminds Percy that he cried while reciting vows at their wedding, he insists, "I wasn't crying, I was sweating from the eyes." Later, Percy advises Theresa to fix a misunderstanding with Simon, warning, "Pride ain't nothing when it comes to matters of the heart." (And yes, he really means it.)

Mac isn't as remarkable here as he was in Mr. 3000 (a much richer, more personal movie) but his presence is still unique-charming and provocative, big but still real. He connects with Tracy's work in the original film by giving the character an additional social and political dimension beyond his plot function. Percy's a cantakerous buppie who busted his hump to get where he is. He has no patience for the brand of white entitlement exemplified by Simon, who affects a prep school kid's seen-it-all bemusement even though he's a working-class guy raised by a single mom. Kutcher is a fine foil for the blustering, W.C. Fields-ish Mac. Percy is a macho man, hypersensitive to perceived slights, while Simon is a stealth wiseass-his halting delivery recalls Woody Harrelson-who ribs people so subtly that they aren't sure if they were insulted or just imagined it.

Sullivan knows that Mac and Kutcher are the show here-an unexpectedly potent comedy team, and a living illustration of the idea that blacks and whites are stuck in the same house, the same car, the same bed, and have to deal with it. It's irresistible force-meets-immovable-object humor, nearly as exquisite as De Niro and Charles Grodin's banter in Midnight Run. Their work-and the work of Scott and Saldana-elevates the picture, making it light (but not insubstantial) comedy.

American tabloid: J.X. Williams' Peep Show, which recently played the New York Underground Film Festival and screens at Anthology Film Archives April 2, sounds like the answer to an underground film buff's prayers. It's described as a black-and-white, 16mm fantasia on JFK, Sam Giancana, Fidel Castro and Frank Sinatra that anticipated the conspiratorial improvisations of Oliver Stone and James Ellroy. According to interviews with Williams, a mob-connected cult filmmaker, the movie was shot in Copenhagen in 1965, illustrated with found footage and pre?Thomas Crown Affair split-screen effects, then banned from American screens due to its political recklessness and hardcore stag-party clips. Williams, who serves as the picture's froggy-voiced narrator, spins a nightmare scenario in which Giancana hooks Sinatra on heroin to cement his services as a mole in Camelot, where he serves as the chief executive's swingin' sidekick and primo bird supplier.

Alas, there is no Santa Claus, and no J.X. Williams, either. The filmmaker is the invention of 33-year-old San Francisco filmmaker Noel Lawrence, a friend and business partner of experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin (Sonic Outlaws). The film was shot not in Copenhagen circa 1965, but in San Francisco a couple of years ago, then screened in collaboration with art house programmers who'd agreed not to spoil the ruse.

Williams pieced together Peep Show from newsreels, old Hollywood movie clips (including footage from Sinatra's junkie star turn in The Man with the Golden Arm), primitive CGI footage, fake FBI surveillance photos and real, circa-1960s close-ups of prostitutes servicing clients (some of the clips are courtesy of Baldwin, a one-time porn house projectionist). The director narrated the film in character as the decrepit Williams, smoking and drinking until he achieved what he describes as "just the right pre-throat-cancer voice."