Life

In Life, two black Americans Ray and Claude (Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence) are sentenced wrongly to lifelong terms in prison on a fitted up charge of murder. This happens in what must have been among the most racist of American states Mississippi.

However Eddie Murphy, who produced Life as well as playing one of the two leading roles, tries to turn what you would think would have been a dismal prison drama into a bitter sweet comedy. I guess you can sell more tickets that way.

So Murphy's prison seems to be more like a country holiday camp than the expected hell hole, with baseball, barbecues, unending sunny days and plenty of laughs.

Ray and Claude, who weren't friends before they went to jail, in the tradition of The Shawshank Redemption, The Odd Couple or even Grumpy Old Men, maintain their mock animosity and a friendship develops.

But what of reality? Prison for black Americans in Mississippi through the thirties for sixty-five years would have been for the most part horrific I would think and portraying this situation so fondly strikes me as being an ill founded attempt at historical revisionism.

But I'd also think that playing the inmates as high voiced, roll eyed caricatures, would also be insulting to right thinking people.

Note the rumblings of disappointment about the jive talking digital creature in the latest Star Wars film; an invention straight out of the Amos And Andy talent stable.

If any actor black or white had played Jar Jar Binks like that he would have been in real trouble, and especially if he had been white. But an African American playing Jar Jar Binks in that racist, demeaning way should raise similar hackles. Similar rules should apply to our black film stars.

It's impossible for me here in Australia to make any really meaningful comment on what may or may not be acceptable to African Americans in this regard, but I'd imagine that if a white actor had played a black American in that way there would be hell to pay and rightly so.

Eddie Murphy is an intelligent and capable actor. The Distinguished Gentleman, a film where he plays an African American who runs for the American Congress, shows just how upbeat and responsible Murphy's characters can be, but Life is low life.

The (white) teenagers in the cinema with me thought that these actors were hilarious judging by their laughter but it appeared to me that their reaction was caused by their sniggers to this ninties version of "niggers" (the term nigger was used repeatedly by the inmates in the film).

That's not healthy and it's also not funny.