The Tenants Reviewed February 3, 2006

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Sunday, 17 January 2010 13:36

Written by Laura Blum

Snoop Dogg fans beware. The Tenants may not be what you'd expect from a movie co-starring your favorite Rhythm & Gangsta MC. It's a bookish drama about class, color and creativity that's as confining as its tenement setting. You may rather party at Big Momma’s House.
 
Not that The Tenants ain't got game. Director Danny Green's screen adaptation of the 1971 novel by Bernard Malamud looks for ironies in pre-chi chi Brooklyn and finds them.

The story has us over to writer Harry Lesser's (Dylan McDermott) humble abode where the bearded neurotic labors to finish his third book. His solitude–-and writing-–is disrupted when aspiring thug author Willie Spearmint (Snoop Dogg) squats down the empty hall. Contemplative schlemiel mentors anti-Semite Angry Black Man until bleeding heart indulgence comes back to bite his Jewish ass.

However well-intended Lesser's paternalism, his narcissistic cluelessness ignites Willie's rage. Tensions alternately flare and cool as the two alter-artists grapple with the meaning of invention and reality in late 60s America. As the relationship jerks on we start to dread their fate.

Menace gives way to tragedy when Lesser gets Willie's white girl (Rose Byrne) and landlord Levenspiel (Seymour Cassel) presses to evict both stragglers and lower the wrecking ball. As Malamud would say, "Oy vey."

Screenwriters Green and David Diamond are hardly the master of their craft the way Pulitzer laureate Malamud was of his, and the dialogue is often too literate and stylized to float onscreen. Likewise the script's cycles of collegiality and combustion exhaust the actors' efforts to build nuance, leaving the human comedy to caricature and abstraction. Perhaps it's a novice writer's thing.

The Tenants is too plodding and claustrophobic for a night on the town. But for patient students of race relations, social advantage and art, it may be just the rental. (DVD release date March 7.)