Jeffery Wright Tagged Articles at Cinematical

After seeing Oliver Stone's W., I found myself wishing I had a little more time to think it over before writing a review; then again, I'm sure there are some involved with the film who found themselves wishing they had a little more time to think over the Bush administration before making it. Distance grants perspective, or so we're told; what could a film about the life and presidency of George W. Bush released while he's still in office really have to say about his life and times? If distance grants perspective, though, you could also argue that proximity grants immediacy, and argue that Stone's W. is not meant as a somber, serious look back but rather a cautious, nervy attempt to peer into the recent past, a film with, in the words another Presidential candidate recently borrowed, "the fierce urgency of now."

But W. has plenty of urgency; you could argue that what it lacks is a point of view, or rather a point of view other than Freudian family psychodrama, with George W. Bush (Josh Brolin) fighting for the presidency and fighting in Iraq as a way to earn the respect and love of his distant, driven father George H. W. Bush (James Cromwell). But to many, examining the inner life of George W. Bush is like asking yourself about the source of the lumber when you're being hit in the head with a baseball bat. We get a lot of dialogue in W. about the difference between the external and the internal, between ideology and identity; Laura Bush (Elizabeth Banks) offers that "I don't think politics should define a human being ..." while George H.W. notes that "I've always believed in leaving personal feelings out of politics." But in W., it feels like Stone doesn't even want to let politics define politics, and leaving the politics out of the personal feelings he's exploring.

Though Devil in a Blue Dress wasn't as consistently strong as one (meaning I) might have hoped, it did offer us Walter Mosley's duo, Easy Rawlins and his violent buddy Mouse, played by two pretty fantastic actors; Don Cheadle, in particular, was riveting as the almost-unhinged Mouse. Because of his performance and the huge presence of Denzel Washington, it's always been hard to imagine that anyone with any brains would take on another of Mosley's books without them, just because replacing that duo is such a daunting task. HBO Films, however, is up to the task, and they've grabbed a pretty impressive pair of actors to play the roles: According to Variety, Jeffrey Wright and Mos Def will star in HBO's screen version of Mosley's Little Scarlet, though they haven't yet decided who will take which role.

Well, hell. That's ... awesome. Both men are truly great actors (I actually saw them on stage together in Top Dog/Underdog, and Wright's performance was so powerful that I completely forgot I'd bought the ticket because I wanted to see Cheadle), and with Mosley writing the screenplay, this movie has a hell of a lot of promise. And my vote is for Mos Def to play Mouse. Just, you know, if anyone from HBO Films wanders by and really wants some blogger advice.