Eddie Griffin ups the black comedy ante.
Comedian Eddie Griffin turns to the backstage camera in Dysfunktional Family, slightly anxious and preoccupied, but on. "A good show starts in the dressing room and works its way to the stage," he says. Walking toward the footlights and a lively, expectant crowd, Griffin winds himself up. You practically see the private gears turning in his head. He's about to do work-using comedy as a tire iron to pry open some cultural myths. Family is the first; not just the central enclave in Kansas City, MO, that gave birth to and raised the performer (some of the family members are shown in interview segments) but also the national audience who shares his sense of humor about sex, family, race, politics, celebrity. Dysfunctional us.
A socially alert comedian's concert movie can turn a show into a colloquy on our occupations and social roles. Instead of issuing a political platform, the comedian's assessments reflect back experiences and reactions we'd otherwise keep to ourselves. And with comedian-actor Griffin, these observations seem to leap out-vulgarly, maniacally-because his career is so often subordinated to the designs of less-penetrating writers and directors. Doing stand-up lets Griffin uncensor himself (including his already-controversial Osama bin Laden ethnic profiling). Dysfunktional Family shows that Griffin has a worldview, and this movie looks at where it comes from.
Griffin's documentary format (produced by David Permut, who innovated Richard Pryor's standard-setting 1979 Live in Concert) is more serious than the sitcom prelude of Eddie Murphy's 1987 Raw-a premature self-presentation made before Murphy had assessed his own prodigious talent (he simply coasted on others' febrile assumptions). Director George Gallo goes to Griffin's mother, Uncle Bucky and Uncle Curtis to establish influences and role models-an unexpected emphasis on family authority. This sets the tone for Griffin's personal synthesis of his single mother's disciplinarian autocracy (stories about getting whupped with a belt, then a switch), Uncle Bucky's hard life as an ex-con and junkie ("My uncle was a thief, gangster, pimp; he pretty much got crime covered") and Uncle Curtis' movie mania (centering on his vast porno collection and roue's expertise). Without probing these influences, the film only adequately reveals the life examples behind Griffin's jokes as he veers between different moral poles. During a particularly raunchy discourse on pussy eating, Gallo catches a shot of Griffin's mother in the audience refusing to laugh, looking chagrined.
Dysfunktional Family provides a context for understanding the risks contemporary black comics take to be outrageous and shameless. Though not a psychological analysis of Griffin, it shows him mirroring his upbringing and his society. As much as the James Brown music on the soundtrack, it provides a rooted sense to his routines-such as a 9/11 observation that goes from warm-and-fuzzy to sharp ("It helped with race relations-that lasted 30 days"). One rarely questions the authenticity of a joke that makes one laugh, but this movie reveals the purpose behind both making jokes and seeking release.
Implicit in the concept of The Original Kings of Comedy-and well articulated there by Cedric the Entertainer and Bernie Mac-was the sense of unification that results from good, vulgar, parochial humor. Griffin understands this prime credo of showbiz-even when he follows a gay routine with the sly, "My bad." (Realizing that "dysfunctional" now stands for typical, Griffin interprets how we function despite our problems.) The film's commercially spelled title merely exploits a cultural perception, but Griffin's quip-"black men walk to a heart beat"-gives a necessary validation.
For me, Griffin needed this kind of self-explanation more than any other modern black comic. He often seems a throwback to the unconscientious, deprecating display of easily stereotyped performers. Too genuine to slip past white apprehension by presenting himself above the ghetto, as Chris Rock does, Griffin embraces low-life, taking it on as something he knows-and knows is part of us. (It's a more honest, less condescending stance than anything in the contrived mainstream "blackness" of Rock's Head of State.) Dysfunktional Family makes it possible to notice Griffin's intelligence-which is usually hidden by his manic drive. The intensity that gives the dark-skinned, hard-eyed little man a resemblance to the mischievous Itchy (of The Simpsons' Itchy and Scratchy cartoon parodies) is the same thing that made Griffin burn through the pretenses of the Vietnam War drama The Walking Dead. Griffin has a vicious power on screen. Like his obstreperous yet prudent mother, you inevitably feel chagrined about the vulgar truth he reveals.
Thus, Griffin's second revelation: After broadening the definition of "family," he's come the closest anyone has dared in clarifying the modern term "nigga." In Griffin's socially connected monologue, the word gets understood as America's most variable, all-purpose noun: meaning "you," "it," "him" in addition to the historic pejorative. Whether or not this is a good thing, Griffin's stand-up acerbity gives pop language etymological layers. He restores a form of what Langston Hughes called negritude. Yet he knows what's at stake. The most moving segment of his monologue imagines what the careers of several black stars would be like if they hadn't had the honesty, determination and luck to achieve their renown: Sammy Davis, Jr. working at McDonald's, Bill Cosby a pimp, Pryor as president, Prince playing piano in church-each what-if is funny yet poignant.
It's troubling that a mind and talent like Griffin's are rarely accommodated by mainstream cinema, which is at ease with Chris Rock's namby-pamby race humor, leaving Griffin to fight for his identity amid the crush of demeaning stereotypes. Griffin's persona-he plays race's wild card-was wasted on Double Take and Undercover Brother (which was stolen by Dave Chappelle anyway). But imagine what Griffin's ghetto-id would have done for the snooty, inaccurate pretenses of a movie like Far from Heaven. Todd Haynes got cultural tropes bollixed; he racistly put a 60s Poitier cliche into a fabricated setting that misrepresented how America and Hollywood actually dealt with interracial sex in the 50s. (cf., Island in the Sun, Tamango). Haynes shied from modern millennial consciousness-in fact indulging modern racism-by refusing to confront contemporary art-house bigotry. Had Eddie Griffin wooed Julianne Moore's prim housewife with lust and triumph in his eyes, he could have stuck a pitchfork in American family dysfunction. Without a reprobate like Griffin, Haynes-and Hollywood-fall short of satirical heaven and end up in smug hell.
Aki Kaurismaki is Finland's counterpart to deadpan Jim Jarmusch. Both refuse Hollywood luxe for a maddening insistence on flaky realism and weird humor. Kaurismaki's The Man Without a Past distills a soap-opera plot about an amnesiac victim of a mugging (Markku Peltola) who recreates a new life for himself in a backwater town. Problem is, this life is as grim and hardscrabble as what he left behind. Kaurismaki's joke that life offers no alternative but the possibility that man can always hope at least makes him a funky kind of realist-one who pretends not to dream. False dreams are the evil of mainstream filmmaking, but there ought to be something honorable besides Kaurismaki's stoicism. The tough-luck faces and expert, minimalist film craft seem deliberately deprived, almost punishing. I get his rock 'n' roll in-joke (positing DIY rocking-out along with DIY film style); I just don't like it. Kaurismaki and his anomic "rockers" don't groove. And in pop art, grooving is next to godliness.
Not as complex as Kaurismaki's characters, the Dominican Republic-Loisaida teenagers in Raising Victor Vargas have youth on their side. Director Peter Sollett and cinematographer Tim Orr also endow them with ecstatic, low-budget artistry. Urban youth's awakening has been done with more depth (in Jim McKay's Our Song and Eric Eason's Manito) but there's enough realism and gentleness here to keep one charmed. The way Victor (Victor Rasuk) approaches Judy (Judy Marte), working himself up-putting his ego into his frail, mannish shoulders-is lovely. It captures an essence, right? As true as the way these kids talk among one another with that awful New York combination of enthusiasm and threat. This less-than-ideal quality of life is given real pulse-a sign of love no less genuine than Kaurismaki's. Sollett's tacit respect matches Orr's portraiture-as fine as Ernest Dickerson's best work with Spike Lee. Victor, his family and friends seem to have the sun inside them. Nothing's new in this look at first love, but it's impossible to not smile back at it.