#027 - Amos & Andrew (1993)
Hello and welcome to my weblog. A couple of weeks back I watched Amos & Andrew (1993).
This movie is a slap-stick, zany buddy comedy about how racism in the United States is systemic and how class, wealth, and erudition are all secondary to race in the American social order, even in progressive strongholds.
Samuel L. Jackson plays Andrew, a famous playwright who buys a house on an exclusive island; the action of the movie takes place over the course of his first night in his new house. His neighbor, who frequently tries to prove his progressiveness by mentioning that he was part of the legal team for the Chicago Seven, sees Andrew through the window and immediately calls the cops. They show up and quickly start shooting at an unarmed Andrew. The shooting only ends when the chief of police, who has larger political ambitions, realizes both that Andrew is famous and that Andrew doesn’t realize that it was his deputies who had been shooting at him.
Nic Cage plays Amos, an aimless sleezeball sitting in the police lock-up. The chief of police hatches a plan to try to pin the shooting on Amos, telling Amos he’ll let him go at the end of the night if he pretends to kidnap Andrew. Amos and Andrew eventually realize that the police want both of them dead and team up to escape the island. This movie, I remind you, is a comedy.
A common criticism of this movie when it was released thirty years ago was that it was both too silly and too serious in its portrayal of racism and police brutality; that portraying such gross, casual racism in a studio comedy was jarring. Watching it now, I feel like that was the whole point.