Rita Kempley of the Washington Post picked up the ball Saturday with a great article . WaPo metro columnist Courtland Malloy took the handoff and moved the meme forward yesterday into national politics, asserting, "In the Bush administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell is the magic caddy. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice stars as the gung-ho psychic."
Today the New York Times' Samuel G. Freedman picks up the analytic trend. He writes:
The praise for "Bruce Almighty" in black intellectual circles is not unanimous. The cultural critics Gerald Early of Washington University in St. Louis and Linda Williams of the University of California at Berkeley said that Mr. Freeman is carrying on what Ms. Williams, in an e-mail message, called "the same old tradition of the saintly black man who is shown caring for the relatively trivial worries of white protagonists."
Both scholars traced that line of cinematic characterization back to Uncle Tom tending Little Eva in the 1927 film adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Sidney Poitier took on several such roles in the postwar decades, particularly as the handyman caring for a group of white nuns in "Lilies of the Field" (1963). Mr. Freeman himself portrayed the moral instructor of a self-absorbed white as a rich widow's chauffeur in "Driving Miss Daisy," the 1989 screen version of Alfred Uhry's play.
"We have here another instance of a wise black person helping a white person achieve insight, realize his humanity," Professor Early said of "Bruce Almighty." "That's about as tired a Hollywood formula, indeed an American culture formula, as one can get." He added, "Audiences subconsciously were drawn to it, particularly white audiences who like their black folk nonthreatening and supportive."
Who's next?
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