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Ghetto hideous

Do not walk, run from this film
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
April 18th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Tongue depressing. Eddie Murphy co-stars with Eddie Murphy in this steaming pile.
The hackneyed old truism that you will inevitably become what you fear most seems to apply to Eddie Murphy. In his Saturday Night Live days, he was a sharp comedian who mercilessly sent up black stereotypes to escape from what Alice Walker memorably called the “prisons of image.” But now the old iconoclast has settled in to become his generation’s Buckwheat.
Norbit

Directed by Brian Robbins
With Eddie Murphy, Thandie Newton, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Marlon Wayans

It would be difficult to find a worse film currently crowding screens than Murphy’s Norbit. While Rowan Atkinson’s salute to cretinism in Mr. Bean’s Holiday is merely aggressively imbecilic, Norbit is grimly depressing. With the notable exception of his recent turn in Dreamgirls, Murphy has long shown an almost criminal preference for third-rate material. Yet this steaming pile of jokes and japes seems to signal that the old Murphy has sold his talent on the block, and that all we can expect from him in the future is more Uncle Tom jive.
No expense or taste has been spared in this broken-down Murphy vehicle, where the actor gets to play dress-up as three characters. There’s Norbit (aka Buckwheat), his morbidly obese wife Rasputia (a rib-shack production of Mondo Trasho), and a racist Chinese restaurant/orphanage owner, Mr. Wong. The supporting cast is a gallery of black cartoons, all pimps swathed in “hos,” thugs and the requisite hand-clappin’ and shoutin’ church choir.
Norbit comes complete with an I-don’t-know-nothin’-’bout-birthin’-no-babies simplicity and Stepin Fetchit smile. In his rubber flab as Rasputia, Murphy goes ghetto for our pleasure, sweatily striving to introduce a new catch-phrase for the unoriginal to mouth: “How YOU doin’?” Mr. Wong is a gross caricature in Max Factor cobalt-yellow slap, complete with slanted eyes.
To retell the plot of this impoverished heap would be to relive it. Instead, a sampling of dialogue will give you a glimpse of the atrophied imaginations behind this epic. Rasputia: “Who the hell was eatin’ that turkey ass?” Mr. Wong (on the verge of throwing a harpoon at Rasputia): “Whale ho!” Rasputia: “Did somebody call me a whale?” Mr. Wong: “Yeah, and a ho!” Mr. Wong (in reintroducing Norbit to his childhood sweetheart): “Maybe you poop together again.”
Hardly a nimble wit. In fact, it’s hardly bipedal. It is strictly geared for merdivores and those souls who might have accidentally suffered an oxygen debt at birth. That American cinema is a 24-hour all-you-can-eat buffet of crap is a sad given. But is there really an appetite for this muck overseas?
The Czech reception for other similarly execrable outings, i.e. Waiting, You, Me and Dupree and Employee of the Month, has been encouragingly hostile, and all rightfully earned their failures at the local box office. Yet, like some unchecked sump pump, Hollywood needs to flood the world with its waste to recoup some of its expenditures (even though Norbit earned back half its costs on its opening weekend in the States, and has since gone on to make $95 million domestically).
Rumor has it that Thandie Newton, who plays Norbit’s old girlfriend, threatened to leave the film on a couple of occasions. For the sake of her CV, she should have. Still, the actress does a good job of signaling humiliation in her eyes to those trapped in the cinema who might be capable of commiseration.
Finally, what can be said of Cuba Gooding, Jr., that dim bulb of Snow Dogs and Boat Trip? True, he once got an Oscar. But, then, so did Lassie, while the Academy never noticed Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson.
Recently I was reading the biography of Oscar Micheaux, the pioneering African-American filmmaker who fought against racist theater chains and white censor boards to get his films, all personally financed, an audience. Norbit is a rather sad chapter to that legacy of struggle, and Murphy has become an embarrassment — though hardly a laughable one.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (18/04/2007):

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