Love In New York

Chris Rock's I Think I Love My Wife is one of those really frustrating movies that come close...so close to being satisfying. Though I knew the film was uneven, one key moment near the end is set up so beautifully subtly, and paid off so well, that I was almost willing to forgive it everything.

But when it goes wrong, it goes so wrong that it undoes and overwhelms anything it did right. In one scene, a series of Viagra jokes comes to an end that's so wildly over the top I was sure it would turn out to be a nightmare sequence, but was wrong. In another...I mean, they just start singing...

While watching it, I found myself remembering something Norm MacDonald says in the book Live From New York, addressing the question of whether Rock was "underutilized" on Saturday Night Live.

He said:

Chris is a great stand-up comedian, a great voice. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean he's a great sketch-comedy comedian.

I think that's right. And I think it doesn't necessarily mean he knows how to sustain a movie's tone for an hour and a half, either.

I wanted to like this film, for at least a couple of reasons. First, I think Rock is a great, smart comic. And I was intrigued when I learned it was a remake of a movie by French filmmaker Eric Rohmer, to whom I've paid homage a few times in the past.

But to tell stories of the caliber that I think Rock aspires to, and he's made a dignified effort here, he probably needs a better director and he definitely needs better screenwriters.

In this case, I think a woman writer especially might have helped. As most of you know, I'm the last one to say a male writer cannot write witty, strong female characters-but Rock and his writing partner Louis C.K. haven't.



Kerry Washington at least gets a better chance. Perfectly cast as temptation, she has a breathtakingly beautiful body but is also a good actress. She gives the impression that there's more going on with this character than just a sexy way of walking.

Gina Torres, as Rock's wife, suggests in one or two of her scenes that she could bring life to a more fully developed character. But her character is not more fully developed. I wouldn't dare to speculate about why two married men wrote a film about marital boredom and gave the "other woman" their more ample attention.

Though sexy (see top), Torres is also, in my view, miscast. She has virtually no chemistry with Rock (especially compared to Washington, who makes you start hearing Nelly), and I almost never believed these people were really married.

Part of the problem is that Rock, 42, still looks as though he could pass for mid-20s. And Torres, though she's actually younger than he is, appears to be a fully-grown, feet-on-the-floor woman. At best, he comes off more like her younger brother than her husband.

In his director's commentary on the DVD Rock says that one of the reasons he wanted to play the lead was that it was a chance to play a different role. Most if not all of those he gets offered are comic variations on the paranoid, "crazy" black man.

Here he plays a successful; sensible (at the start) man with a good job and a nice house. Rock shows that he has it in him to play such a role-as indeed he should be able to, as it is closer to his own life.

His character is presented as certainly being aware of his color, but though race is present-it would be pure fantasy otherwise-it is secondary to this story.

One of the funniest scenes in the film is Rock's reaction to being the only other black person in an elevator when another begins singing loud, sexist, homophobic rap lyrics. Some of the more successful quiet moments show Rock and his wife worrying that their kids will pick up racial attitudes, or that they do not play enough with other black children.

And then there's the excellent use of the song asking the musical question, "can a nigga get a table dance??" which Rock rightly claims in the commentary is one of the funniest ever.

Also in the cast, Steve Buscemi and notably Edward Herrmann are wasted as Rock's business associates.

It's possible that if I were black or, probably more likely, if I were married and had kids, I would have liked this film more. But I think a better movie would have shown me what that's like, regardless of what my personal experience has been.