Just a Hollywood Ending

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

"If I'm following a general, and he's leading me into a battle, and the enemy tends to give him rewards, or awards, I get suspicious of him. Especially if he gets a peace award before the war is over."

--Malcolm X, after Martin Luther King Jr. received the Nobel Peace Prize

Almost from the start, Denzel Washington and Halle Berry seemed headed for a Hollywood ending. In 1989, when I had just graduated from college and Washington had just matriculated to stardom, I interviewed him about a new movie he was set to star in called Glory. "I think this movie is good for the country," said Washington, who would go on to win a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as Trip, a Union soldier in the Civil War. Two years later, I interviewed another young rising star named Halle Berry, who was co-starring in a comedy about black upper-middle-class romance called Strictly Business. "The last year of my life has moved very, very fast," Berry told me then. Things were about to speed up for both Berry and Washington.

By now everyone knows the Hollywood ending to this tale. Berry and Washington both get nominated for Academy Awards. They are underdogs from the start. But Berry unexpectedly takes home the award--and becomes the first African-American woman in history to win a Best Actress Oscar. Then Washington wins in his category--and becomes the first African-American man to win a leading-actor Oscar since Sidney Poitier for the 1963 film Lilies of the Field. Cue the John Williams music. Roll credits.

Thing is, I've never trusted Hollywood endings. The very term suggests something pat, something fully resolved, something less like Pearl Harbor and more like Pearl Harbor. Real life--and great drama--is more difficult, and the endings are more ragged. Berry and Washington deserved their wins; they gave the best performances in their categories. But it should be noted that their roles were not the kind that would have got Malcolm X to give them a standing O.

Berry, in her Oscar-winning part in Monster's Ball, plays a woman who falls in love with a recovering white racist. After Berry learns that her new love also happens to be the man who executed her husband, she puts up some token resistance, then meekly sticks with him. Even Lifetime TV-movie heroines fight back harder when they find out the men in their lives aren't who they purported to be. Washington, in his Oscar-winning role in Training Day, portrays a murderous, on-the-take narcotics detective. His performance is charged with lightning, but he was better in his more heroic roles in The Hurricane, Crimson Tide and Malcolm X. Oscar passed him by for those performances--just as they did Will Smith this year, the one black actor to be nominated for a heroic character, in Ali.

Like most filmgoers, I'd rather not see African-American actors play only plaster saints. Yet if Hollywood responds to Berry's and Washington's victories by serving up more leading roles for African-American actors that revel in the negative, then the result could be more distorting and destructive than if African-American actors were not recognized at all. We need to see cops and criminals, clowns and villains. We also need to see black actors in romances and sci-fi flicks, fantasy films and musicals--and we need to see such films promoted and, if worthy, honored.

Washington and Berry are two of the sexiest, most appealing actors around, but you rarely see them in romantic parts. Washington's last truly romantic film was Mississippi Masala, which came out in 1991, not long after I first interviewed him. (In a promising development, he's currently scheduled to star in director Carl Franklin's Out of Time, in which he plays a cop caught between two lovers.) Berry's last romantic film was 1992's Boomerang, which also came out around the time I first interviewed her. (Her next film, less promisingly, is a 007 flick, in which she will play a Bond girl.) Things have been moving fast in Washington's and Berry's careers, but in some respects they may have been heading in reverse.

So the peace awards have been handed out, but the battle continues. Will we see a wider spectrum of roles for black actors in the future? And what about Hispanics and Asians? Will any of these groups get roles that capture the roughness and beauty of life or just the street stereotypes of some studio boss's low-ceilinged imagination? If we're all lucky, the story of actors and actresses of color won't have a Hollywood ending.