MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Inkwell’: When Black Classes Clash

“The Inkwell” takes its title from a Martha’s Vineyard beach, an African American enclave since the turn of the century. The film is at once a coming-of-age story, set in the summer of 1976, and a satire on the affectations of the black bourgeoisie. That’s a conceivably viable mix, but unfortunately it proves too great of a stretch for director Matty Rich, who created a stir with his raw, powerful debut film, “Straight Out of Brooklyn,” made when he was only 19, and for his writers, Tom Ricostronza and Paris Qualles.

The problem is simple enough: The writers and the director cannot resist caricaturing black conservatives to ludicrous extremes, thus botching a rare instance in which we’re able to witness a believable conflict of values between classes within black society. Worse yet, the film, which tends to drag, ends up pouring a syrupy sentimentality over both its emotional and social issues.

Incredible as it may seem, an attractive wife and mother (Suzzanne Douglas) insists she did not anticipate trouble when she urges that she and her husband (Joe Morton) and their 16-year-old son (Larenz Tate) spend two weeks with her sister (Vanessa Bell Calloway) and brother-in-law (Glynn Turman) at their place in Martha’s Vineyard.

Morton is a former Black Panther and Turman is so ardent a Republican that he has oil paintings of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford on his living-room wall. Not helping matters is that Douglas’ mother (Mary Alice), who lives with Calloway and Turman, addresses Douglas with cruelty and contempt apparently only because of her husband’s past Panthers affiliation, something that is never explored.

Against this tense background the shy, troubled Tate, urged on by his playboy cousin (Duane Martin), commences to spread his wings ever so tentatively. Where the film is at its most deft and subtle is in the way in which it credibly involves the awkward (but handsome) Tate, first with the imperious queen of the beach (Jada Pinkett), a beauty whose frosty and cynical veneer hides considerable vulnerability, and then with a gorgeous woman (Adrienne-Joi Johnson), married to a compulsive philanderer (Morris Chestnut). (In a way, the film is a black “Tea and Sympathy.”)

The film is on sufficiently sure ground in depicting Tate’s gradual, sometimes funny, sometimes painful, path to maturity that it’s a shame that it otherwise misfires so badly.

Everyone in the large cast is game but understandably only Tate, Pinkett and Johnson are fully persuasive. Let’s hope that the talented Rich will get back on track the next time around.

* MPAA rating: R, for language. Times guidelines: There’s a considerable amount of racy dialogue and a couple of sexy scenes. ‘The Inkwell’

Larenz Tate: Drew Tate

Joe Morton: Kenny Tate

Suzzanne Douglas: Brenda Tate

Glynn Turman: Spencer Phillips

A Buena Vista release of a Touchstone Pictures presentation. Director Matty Rich. Producers Irving Azoff, Guy Riedel. Executive producer Jon Jashni. Screenplay by Tom Ricostronza, Paris Qualles. Cinematographer John L. Demps Jr. Editor Quinnie Martin Jr. Costumes Ceci. Music Terence Blanchard. Production designer Lester Cohen. Art director Daniel Talpers. Set decorator Karen Wiesel. Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.