Luce’s description sounds as if someone who believed every ridiculous conspiracy about Obama and voted for Presidon’t wrote it. A couple adopt an Eritrean child soldier, and he grows up to be a well rounded, popular and beloved valedictorian, but can he be trusted? His foreignness and skin color are like a grenade. You can’t trust immigrants, especially from those countries, and it sounds similar to a cautionary tale to the politically correct. Those brown babies trying to get through our border are terrorists.
The only reason that I considered seeing Luce is because a Nigerian black man, Julius Onah, directed it so I hoped that he was invested in not exploiting fear mongering since it would go against his interests. I also Googled J.C. Lee. Lee is a man of color, but I don’t know any specific details. He writes for How to Get Away With Murder. His Twitter feed is firmly anti-Presidon’t. Still I don’t pay to be mad at a movie. I was most concerned with Octavia Spencer’s role as Luce’s teacher because it sounded like a black woman was the villain. I love her, but everyone has bills, and she was in The Help so she doesn’t get a blank check of trust. I waited three weeks to see it in theaters, and I didn’t leave mad.
If you’re seeing Luce to really delve into complex hot button issues, it is really a veneer of respectability to hide the fact that everyone really should have been making a standard sociopath film, but no one wanted to make a black man into a sociopath so they pulled punches and went with ambiguity to allow the audience to feel some sympathy with the titular character. As a society, we will know that we are finally post-racial when you can have a real thriller with a black man as the psycho and not worry about the implications for everyone that falls into the demographic Venn diagram of that character.
If Luce was in others’ hands such as Lady Macbeth’s director, William Oldroyd, and writer, Alice Birch, I think that it could have accomplished what all the favorable man on the street and critic reviews claims that it has: provide incisive intersectional commentary on race, gender, immigration, class, etc. If it does manage to get anywhere in its broad brushstroke way, it is really about how sisterhood solidarity is fiction. Women and men instinctually protect men even when men don’t deserve protecting. The way that women betray themselves to protect men who actively are trying to harm them is the strongest element in this movie.
As a thriller about a nascent master manipulator, Luce could have shone if it didn’t pump the brakes and really embraced the Thunderdome dynamic that two men enter, one man leaves. As a story about a life slowly being destroyed without any measure of regret or remorse, it was chilling. The film is at its best when Spencer and Kelvin Harrison Jr. go toe to toe with each other, and as a viewer, you’re trying to figure out who will have the upper hand in this battle of wills. The teacher has power and experience, but Luce is an adept navigator of their world because he was forced to study the nuances of the language and culture. His reasons for resenting her, even when expressed frankly, ring hollow. Lee makes it about her assumptions about his blackness, but for me, it was an instinctual resentment at being seen. She knows how the magic trick works and is going to ruin his act. The discussions of blackness did not quite resonate for me although there is an underexplored aspect of survivor’s guilt that could have been a thread throughout the story as a black person and an immigrant. It felt psychologically more plausible if he was protecting himself rather than lashing out on behalf of all students of color who feel the burden of her disparate treatment. Also I don’t believe in real life that a teacher could explicitly do that and not get in trouble.
I was unexpectedly empathetic with the teacher’s life. She is the only character who feels like a complete person whereas everyone else feels as if they are playing roles in their life, but not really living. It doesn’t hurt that Marsha Stephanie Blake, whom I do not recall, but I’ve apparently seen in Nasty Baby and Crown Heights, gives a fearless performance that I haven’t seen in that type of role since Samuel L. Jackson and Halle Berry in Jungle Fever. It is one of those performances that could go wrong if it doesn’t feel organic, but it is a powerful point in the movie that shows how everyone’s theoretical empathy evaporates in the face of genuine messiness.
Naomi Watts definitely gave it her all. She seemed older than usual in Luce, but I did secretly wish that Nicole Kidman were in this film. Kidman can preternaturally shoot beams of love at any person on command. I believed that Watts would do anything for Luce, but I never felt that it was rooted in love, which could have been the point. When the turning point happens, I actually wondered if she did it. I’ve seen too many movies to believe that any Tim Roth character could nurture a well-balanced child. I’m sure that in real life, he is an amazing father, but I’m not watching a documentary so I can’t suspend disbelief. Occasionally his accent slipped. I wasn’t sure what his character did—a lawyer. I could buy that he would be more open about his suspicions, but I know quite a few fathers of adopted children. While it is anecdotal evidence, I’ve never seen one go through that extensive process and not be as fiercely protective and invested as the mothers in their children. The whole baby fever thing felt left field as if Lee wondered if he didn’t stuff enough issues in his story.
I felt as if the movie underwrote the other teenage characters because they seemed two-dimensional or only served the purpose that Lee wanted them to serve at that moment. Other than her addiction to expensive coffee, I couldn’t imagine Stephanie Kim living her life a year later. I was never a teenage boy, but if Kenny is sensitive enough to chide a friend about how he talks about girls, then wouldn’t he be too smart to say his comments about race even if he thought it was true?
Luce wasn’t the horrifying disaster that I thought that it was going to be, but it is also not the high minded, intersectional story that it is considered to be. If you’re looking for representation in your bad guy characters, then Luce could have been the one, but the movie is just as concerned as the teacher with what Luce represents to get him thoroughly dirty as a budding Ripley. Instead of reveling in his victory and gloating, it makes him still needy, seeking approval, finding the mask that will appeal to his audience. A puppet master is usually an egomaniac. It just doesn’t quite add up.