Lakeview Terrace
In "Lakeview Terrace," Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington play Chris and Lisa, interracial yuppie lovebirds who've just moved from Oakland to the Deep South. I don't mean Alabama or Mississippi. I mean Southern California, the suburbs of LA to be exact, where their new next-door neighbor is Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson), a black cop, widower, and Republican father of two who hates, hates, hates watching a foxy sister fool around with a foxy white dude.
Not in his backyard. Apparently, not in their own, either.
Abel wages a torture campaign that might qualify him for employment at Guantanamo. His security floodlights shine into their bedroom. Tires are slashed, friends harassed, central air sabotaged. What is Abel's goal? Winning "Survivor LA"? His plan may be fine for a bad neighbor-from-hell boiling-point thriller, in which the harassed strike back against their harasser. But the makers of "Lakeview Terrace" also want to make a stab at social commentary.
Chris and Lisa aren't merely white, black, and from Oakland. They're interracial Prius drivers from Oakland. The liberal semaphores thicken. He works for an expanding supermarket chain called Good. She does some kind of pro bono design work from home. They're even Utne Reader subscribers. To Abel's consternation, many of the friends at their housewarming party are mixed-race couples. And after Abel proceeds to bait the friends into provoking his rage, one nervous guest changes the subject to wine. "It's Zinfandel," Lisa says. Then she remembers something: "White Zinfandel!"
"Lakeview Terrace" was written by David Loughery and Howard Korder and directed by Neil LaBute, the playwright taking another vacation from his own confrontational material. It's unclear what they want us to think about these characters or their lives, but LaBute doesn't seem to be a fan. He often captures Wilson's character, especially, at his most laughable. This is a white guy who likes hip-hop, but he looks like a zombie when it's on. Only when he chases a would-be intruder with a lacrosse stick are you forced to think, "Now that's more like it."
The movie might have something to say about black racism, but the conversations go nowhere, and the cliches of the genre take over. Plus there's a giant authenticity problem. Lisa never tells off the cop-next-door. She's merely reactive and passive, neither of which seems to be in the character's nature - nor in Kerry Washington's, for that matter. A thriller about a comfortably middle-class black man harassing a comfortably middle-class black woman is some kind of first for the movies, and warrants more than the stupendously toothless treatment we get here.
Actually, the script feels like it's been collecting dust on someone's desk since the LA riots. (Chris actually makes a "Can't we all get along?" plea, and the riots themselves have been replaced with the hokey threat of encroaching wildfires.) Through it all, Jackson is appropriately ridiculous, all but winking at the camera. In similarly charged racial territory, he was a lot better in last year's "Black Snake Moan." Here he's taken Denzel Washington's "Training Day" performance and has so wrung it out for comedy that his character never lives in the world as we know it. He lives in "Crash."
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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