Country: United States
Genre: Drama
Director: Neil LaBute
Year: 2008
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE
Director Neil LaBute likes messing with people and he has a lot of curiousity about social mores. In Lakeview Terrace, he dives headfirst into the thickets of race, class and sexual politics. LaBute manipulates the audience, pushing this button and that button. It’s entertaining enough, and yet….
Samuel L. Jackson plays Abel Turner (think there might be any symbolism in that name?), a single father of two. He’s a disciplinarian, a Republican, and a cop. When Chris (a wan and pasty Patrick Wilson) and Lisa (Kerry Washington) move into the neighborhood, Abel dislikes them on sight, especially when his kids witness the new neighbors doing the double backed dromedary in the pool at night.
The more Abel leans on the new couple, the more little cracks start appearing in the facade of their outwardly tranquil relationship.
Lakeview Terrace is manipulative as hell. It plays on all sorts of stereotypes: the scary black man, cops, white men who listen to rap, and so on. But it isn’t stupid, either. It constantly catches us in our prejudices and questions them. The result is a consistently entertaining picture that makes you think.
However, Lakeview Terrace doesn’t really live as drama. That’s because it’s so obviously a construct, like a Christian passion play. Abel is a trumped up character. All of the ingredients of his life must be precisely mixed to be as explosive as possible, or the events in the story couldn’t possibly take place. And even then, I wonder. Not only does Abel have to be a bigot, angry at his wife, angry at himself, righteous, conservative and everything else, but he has to be an idiot as well in order to make the story work. Abel’s kids are used as props. After they’ve served their purpose, director Neil LaBute loses interest in them.
The punched up, artificial nature of the whole enterprise is mirrored by the device of the wildfire that gets closer and closer to the suburban Southern California cul de sac where the story takes place. Even the title of the movie, Lakeview Terrace, is a reference to the neighborhood where Rodney King was arrested and beaten.
Lakeview Terrace is amusing, and I enjoyed how the story played out, but don’t expect to be moved. True, the movie shows us that race is not a monolithic thing, that it intertwines with class, power, and sexual politics, and that it’s not as easy to pick out a bigot as it was 40 years ago, but director Neil LaBute never gets around to connecting this knowledge to actual flesh and blood human beings. LaBute is too busy scoring gotcha points for that. Lakeview Terrace view of race may be broad, but it’s only skin deep.
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