Developing a Conscience

Just as headlines have been trumpeting the coming together of urbanites and suburbanites, blacks and whites, to rid our cities of drug violence, the Hollywood dream factory is manufacturing hopeful and long-overdue images of racial and ethnic cooperation and coexistence. Well, glory day.

On the surface, Tim Burton’s “Planet of the Apes” and Brett Ratner’s “Rush Hour 2” have little in common. “Planet” is a remake of Franklin J. Schaffner’s classic 1968 sci-fi flick based on the Pierre Boulle novel in which men find themselves in a hostile new world where humans are slaves and apes are masters. In “Rush Hour 2,” a sequel to 1998’s surprise box-office smash, great physical acrobat and martial arts fighter Jackie Chan and mouthy cutup Chris Tucker are re-teamed in a shaggy-dog cop saga involving an international ring of counterfeit-money launderers. So where’s the link?

Ape costumes and police badges aside, the main message delivered by “Planet of the Apes” and “Rush Hour 2” is one of racial and ethnic tolerance. If neither film amounts to a classic or even a great picture, both are entertaining diversions worthy of applause for conveying visions of one-world harmony in mainstream cinema.

“Planet” confronts issues of contemporary ethnicity directly, early on invoking the words of Rodney King--”Can’t we all just get along?”--which are voiced in rather comical fashion by one of the apes, Paul Giamatti’s orangutan Limbo, a weak-willed slave trader who traffics in humans and serves as the film’s comic relief.

“Rush Hour 2” deals with the themes more offhandedly. The main action focuses on the predictable work of good guys catching bad guys and creating excuses for Chan’s spectacular fight choreography. But the subtext here is pure ethnicity. To start, there is the fact that the film is carried by two minority actors, Chan and Tucker, a circumstance that remains too much of a rarity in Hollywood.

The film’s other principals are also minorities: Agent Isabella Molina is played by Roselyn Sanchez, an actress of Puerto Rican descent. Asian actress Zhang Ziyi, one of the stars of Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” issues more high kicks in the role of the cold-blooded Hu Li; and John Lone, also of Asian heritage, appears as underworld kingpin Ricky Tan.

The “Rush Hour” formula, which will doubtless spawn more sequels, is a hopeful contradiction of traditional studio logic. The far more common formula for major Hollywood studio releases involves teaming a leading ethnic actor with one of Caucasian persuasion. It’s Hollywood hedging its box-office bets. Think “Out of Sight,” “The Bone Collector,” the “Lethal Weapon” series, etc.

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The unanticipated success of the original “Rush Hour” and last year’s “Crouching Tiger” may have forever rearranged Hollywood preconceptions about what will and will not sell to mainstream audiences. “Rush Hour 2” gleefully traffics in ethnic stereotypes and cultural history, using both as sources of mirth. Tucker’s Det. Carter claims, “Lionel Ritchie ain’t been black since the Commodores.”

In one of the film’s most comically pointed scenes, Carter distracts a largely white and well-heeled casino crowd by making race an issue and demanding to know why he was given different chips than all the white players. Carter is ostensibly making the ruckus to prevent security guards from pursuing Lee into the casino’s back rooms, but he is also saying what is. The monologue is the sort that gives “Rush Hour 2” an unexpected and welcome import.

The appeal of the comedy, written by Jeff Nathanson from characters created by Ross LaManna, is that each character openly deals with his or her ethnic baggage and transcends the whole messy lot. “I hate this fortune-cookie [stuff],” says Ricky Tan, before getting even with a business partner.

The coexistence of races in “Planet of the Apes” is far more tentative, despite the contemporizing touches brought to Boulle’s 1963 novel by screenwriters William Broyles Jr., Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal. In the early (and most memorable) scenes of Burton’s ambitious but flawed remake, Mark Wahlberg’s stranded astronaut finds himself hunted down and captured by apes (never to be called “monkeys”). The first words he hears spoken in this new place are: “Get your hands off me, you filthy human.”

If Wahlberg’s Leo Davidson is alienated in his new home, he forms an almost immediate and fortuitous bond with the ape called Ari (an intelligent role acted by a scarcely recognizable Helena Bonham Carter). The daughter of a senator wears a coat made by one of her human slaves--an intricate tapestry that she calls proof of the existence of a human culture. At her father’s dinner table, surrounded by militaristic apes, most notably Tim Roth’s seething, man-hating Thade, she courageously argues for equality and peaceful coexistence. “It’s disgusting the way we treat humans,” she says in one of the film’s noble but too didactic moments. “It demeans us as much as it does them.”

But if Burton’s remake confronts themes of species coexistence and even interspecies relationships, it takes only baby steps toward its own bold thinking. Ari and Leo develop a romantic attachment, but the film shies away from dealing with questions of cross-breeding. As insurance against confronting the issue, a blond human female called Daena (a rather wooden Estella Warren) is Ari’s rival for Leo’s affections, but the romantic triangle is never resolved.

“Planet” culminates in a rather convenient deus ex monkey moment and ends with a cheeky but regressive surprise, but its message is resoundingly clear: Hatred and oppression of one race or another is self-defeating, ignorant and narrow-minded.

It is refreshing to see new films in which minority status is no object, and races coexist in harmony. Perhaps, finally, Hollywood is getting a dream.

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Deborah Hornblow is a staff writer for the Hartford Courant, a Tribune company.