Review: Lakeview Terrace

RECOMMENDED

While marketed as an upscale exploitationer about racial sparks, “Lakeview Terrace,” from a script by David Loughery and playwright Howard Korder, is another provocative Neil LaBute turn-it-on-its-head narrative. The backdrop to this story of two battling couples—cop-near-retirement Samuel L. Jackson and newly dream-housed married couple Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington—is a rising aurora of California brushfire that’s been derided by an early reviewer or two, also with the suggestion that the depiction of actions of the antagonist played by Jackson sings of racism. Phooey. What LaBute has done, ever more pertinent with this week’s cataclysmic detonation of massive-scaled mortgage massagers, is to present a tricky fable of the loss of power, of feelings of helplessness. What may seem intrinsically tricky about the power games of black, white and blue in “Lakeview Terrace”‘s schema in fact itches gainfully about the core causes of anger and rash behaviors throughout our complex culture. (Similar hurt is recalled in this week’s “Trouble the Waters,” about degrading conditions in New Orleans.) LaBute begins with “You can kill somebody just once, but in work, a relationship, you can torture them every day of the week,” which he told me a decade ago when “In the Company of Men” was released. That’s where his latest film begins, and despite some brutal third-act mechanisms to get to the finish line, LaBute’s work is sturdy and thoughtful and telling. A scene of intense theatricality may be its most cinematic, a neighborhood bar where the warring males meet after several brutal tangles, lit hellish red, red flame of candles dancing in front of them, the wildfires on the television overhead, their furies tamped but steeped in terrible portent. This is not simplistic work. 110m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Ray Pride)