There Is ‘Life’ in This Idea : Murphy, Lawrence Pump Vitality Into Funny-Sad Jail Tale

Life is full of surprises. Eddie Murphy coming back to earth after “Holy Man,” for instance. Or the oft-crazed Martin Lawrence revealing an unsuspected gift for understatement. Or a movie starring the two of them that’s so gracefully bittersweet and balanced that you forget they were in “Boomerang.”

It’s not just a weird time of the year for movies, it’s a weird year. The comedies have actually been funny (“Analyze This” and “10 Things I Hate About You,” at least), so the planets are obviously out of alignment. Further confusing things is “Life,” director Ted Demme’s latest and the long-awaited reunion of Murphy and Lawrence, which confirms the suspicion that some things, at least, are going unnervingly right.

From graveside at a sparsely attended prison burial, “Life” flashes back 50-odd years to the incarceration of Ray Gibson (Murphy) and Claude Banks (Lawrence), two hapless small-timers framed for the murder of a black gambler by a white sheriff in Prohibition-era Mississippi. It’s the prison-as-legalized-slave-plantation and the Depression-era version of being disappeared.

Prisons are a great source of primitive comedy--brutality, criminality, imminent sodomy--it’s all hilarious. And the last thing you want to call a comedy is thoughtful; that would be the kiss of death. But while “Life” is certainly no treatise on race, crime or the bad sense it took to be black and in Mississippi circa 1932, it never forgets the plausibility of its story.

The focus of the camp itself manages to turn from hard labor to baseball games and barbecues; there’s a terrific fantasy sequence in which Ray imagines the nightclub he’s going to open in New York, and his bunkmates join in--the irritating Claude is cast as a waiter. But there’s always an underlying sense of loss and an awareness that men like Claude and Ray could easily have been forgotten inside Mississippi’s legalized plantation system.

Which gives all the jokes (some of them eagerly crude or enthusiastically homophobic) a connection to, yes, life. Demme finally lays it on the line with an obvious but undeniably poignant sequence in which the passage of Ray’s and Claude’s lives are marked by their prison mates vanishing one by one, intercut with a roll call of history--the history they’ve missed: Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the moonwalk. Murphy and Lawrence are funny, of course, but “Life” is also ennobled by the sense that injustice was, is and, as far as we can tell, ever will be, with us.

“Life’s” lessons? Never play poker in a town you don’t know; never touch a blood-soaked body when the sheriff needs a fall guy; never try to escape from prison without a decent map and a boat (didn’t they ever see “Papillon”?) and--this spring at least--don’t judge a movie by its poster.

*

* Rating R for strong language and a shooting. Times guidelines: It’s no “Doctor Dolittle”; less an Eddie Murphy comedy than a grown-up story.

“Life”

Eddie Murphy: Ray Gibson

Martin Lawrence: Claude Banks

Obba Babatunde: Willie Long

Ned Beatty: Dexter Wilkins

Bernie Mac: Jangle Leg

Niguel A. Nunez Jr.: Biscuit

Clarence Williams III: Winston Hancock

Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment present a Brian Grazer production of a Ted Demme film. Directed by Ted Demme. Written by Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone. Produced by Brian Grazer, Eddie Murphy. Executive producers Karen Kehela, James D. Brubaker. Director of photography Geoffrey Simpson. Production designer Dan Bishop. Edited by Jeffrey Wolf. Original score Wyclef Jean. Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes.

In general release throughout Southern California.