Skip to main contentFor the past few weeks, I've been inundated with pleas from nearly everyone I know to take them to the advance screening of a single movie. But unlike requests to see films like Kill Bill, Matrix Revolutions and Lord of the Rings, the interest in this screening is not about the actual movie. For some reason, everyone I know has become obsessed with watching me watch Radio, the new film starring Cuba Gooding Jr.
For those of you unfamiliar with the ongoing saga of David Walker, Film Critic at Large, I don't like Cuba Gooding Jr. Sure, there are plenty of people I don't like--George W. Bush and Adolph Hitler, for example. But I really don't like Cuba. He is a shucking, jiving, prancing, eye-bugging jigabuffoon (that's a cross between a jigaboo and buffoon) who is quick to adopt minstrel antics in films like Lightning Jack and Snow Dogs. When it comes to black actors working in Hollywood, none in recent history has been more guilty of doing the "swamp guinea shuffle," in an effort to amuse white people, than Cuba. At the same time, this is the same guy who won an Oscar for his work in Jerry Maguire, and sooner or later we all knew he would cast aside the fried-chicken-and-watermelon roles he was doing for a paycheck, and take another shot at an Academy Award.
In deciding what would be his next Oscar-worthy roll, Cuba must have watched Eddie Murphy in Bowfinger. "A black dude who plays a slave that gets his ass whipped gets the nomination, a white guy who plays an idiot gets the Oscar. That's what I need, I need to play a retarded slave--then I'll get the Oscar," said Murphy's character. It's advice Cuba took--at least partially--to heart when signing on to Radio.
Inspired by a true story, Radio co-stars Gooding as James "Radio" Kennedy, a mentally challenged young man living in a rural South Carolina town in 1976. After an unfortunate hazing incident at the hands of the high-school football team, Radio comes to the attention of Coach Harold Jones (Ed Harris). Coach Jones takes Radio under his wing and helps transform him from a nearly inarticulate bucktoothed halfwit to a gregarious, vital member of the community. Of course, in the process, as is apt to happen in films about the mentally challenged, Radio changes everyone around him. "We're not the ones been teaching Radio," says Coach Jones. "He's been teaching us."
Radio could have been a compelling film, if it was a made-for-television movie 20 years ago, starring LeVar Burton. But now it is little more than a hopelessly pedestrian biopic that tries to use sports as a metaphor for life. Only problem is, films like Brian's Song and Remember the Titans have already done it, and they've done it much better. The screenplay by local scribe Mike Rich (Finding Forrester) is an exercise in predictability, while director Mike Tollin seems to have memorized the How to Get an Audience to Cry on Demand book of filmmaking. Lucky for all those involved that Radio's life comes complete with an evil town banker out to destroy him, as well as a rookie cop who mistakes him for a crook while he's out delivering presents on Christmas--it makes the translation to palatable cinematic convention that much easier.
In a surprising show of restraint, Gooding is not nearly so annoying or offensive as in his last few films. But as far as on-screen simpletons go, he's no Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks) or Chauncey Gardner (Peter Sellers in Being There). There is nothing magical about Radio that transforms those around him into better people. He's just a retarded guy whom people like. And yet, for some reason, the film moves forward as if Radio were in fact a savant with mystical powers to heal the most damaged soul. Every spastic movement he makes or mumbled word he speaks brings everyone closer to inner harmony, but only because that's the formula films of this nature are required to follow.
Radio is not a bad film. For some people--especially those who lead sheltered lives--it may serves as some sort of valuable life lesson that all human beings have feelings and every life has merit. Of course, The Station Agent holds similar lessons, and that film is a textured, emotionally complex movie grounded by fully realized characters. The ironic thing is that The Station Agent is centered on fictional characters who seem very real, while the real-life-inspired characters in Radio are recycled from the discarded cardboard of dozens of other films.
Rated PG.
Opens Friday, Oct. 24. Sherwood, Evergreen Parkway, Lloyd Cinema, Movies on TV, City Center, Cinema 99, Vancouver Plaza, Division Street, Broadway, Wilsonville, Tigard, Hilltop, Cornelius, Oak Grove, Sandy
WWeek 2015