[CrimsonTide4]

Africana Reviews: The Fighting Temptations

In The Fighting Temptations Cuba Gooding piles another shovel of coal on his career while Beyonce Knowles fails to continue the winning streak started with her solo debut, Crazy In Love.




Email Letter to the Editor



Reviewed by Armond White

"Booty is in the eye of the beholder," Cuba Gooding, Jr. says to Mike Epps as they drive through the streets of Montecarlo, Ga. in an early scene of The Fighting Temptations. Just then, they spot Beyonce Knowles through the car's side window. That's as close as this ever film gets to being clever. And if there's a hint of condescension in the joke — some slight diminishment of Beyonce's talent and beauty for the simple recognition of her booty — that's also typical of the let-down of this entire film.
Nothing in The Fighting Temptation clicks. Nothing seems true to the way black people practice religion or choir members pursue their art.
Only an idiot could behold beauty in the unimaginative musical comedy of The Fighting Temptations. It gives particular insult to the possibility — the expectation — of turning Beyonce into a movie star because it betrays everything her career currently stands for: the infusion of Southern sass into contemporary pop, the exuberance of youthful music-making and, most extraordinary of all, the young singer's respect for politeness and virtue that somehow can be seen within her capacity for abundant sexiness. Anyone paying attention to today's popular culture could easily imagine that Beyonce's success and newness might inspire filmmakers to create movie entertainment that celebrated the pop instinct within black culture - the way Ethel Waters and Lena Horne were brought to the big screen in the 40s, the way Abbey Lincoln was costumed and filmed in the 1956 The Girl Can't Help It. By having Beyonce play Lilly, a single unwed mother who returns to the church to help its choir win the state-wide Gospel Explosion contest is a situation that could make good use of her blues and gospel heritage. Unfortunately, The Fighting Temptations is all-around uninspired — from the unexceptional pop-gospel tunes written and produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to the screenplay by Elizabeth Hunter and Saladin K. Patterson that seems ignorant of all black ethnic nuance to the direction by Jonathan Lynn that disgraces every visual and emotional opportunity.

Except for Beyonce, who acquits herself with her usual sunniness (a pop star isn't required to "act," just be), even the acting/characterizations disappoint. Cuba Gooding Jr. plays the lead role Darrin Hill, a young black man born in Georgia, but when his mother (played by Faith Evans) was thrown out of Beulah Baptist Church for singing nights in a local beer joint, he grew up on the road as she toured, trying to make a singing career. In the most maladroit storyline since Mariah Carey's Glitter (only worse), a time-lapse reintroduces Darrin Hill as an embittered ad executive in New York City. He tries advancing in the agency by mounting a malt liquor ad campaign that blatantly targets black urban consumers. In the '70s, this might have seemed cutting-edge, or even today this action might have defined Darrin Hill as a man of self-hating greed. But The Fighting Temptations is unconvincing when it argues that there are virtues worth fighting for, or that there is such a thing as a black sell-out. This film was made by sell-outs.

As the plot develops all the characters are only interested in gain and acquisition at any cost. Despite appearances by Reverend Shirley Caesar, Donald McClurkin, Yolanda Adams plus Clarence Fountain and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, this is a pop-gospel movie musical with no spiritual feeling.

Cuba Gooding's Darrin Hill out-blands Denzel Washington's angel in The Preacher's Wife — and you remember what a disappointing, un-black film that was. Gooding doesn't resolve his square image — that would require a characterization that showed him rediscovering his Southern black roots; if not actually singing gospel then demonstrating that he appreciated the unfettered emotional display that made church a respite from the everyday anxieties black people go through. The Fighting Temptations exaggerates black churchliness as offensively as in Kingdom Come. In fact, the stereotypes here are unfathomably inaccurate. The Sunday morning musical numbers are loaded with hysterics and calisthenics. The Holy Roller dancing and shouting are edited by Paul Hirsch with sheer indifference; he and director Lynn go for frenzy, not jubilation. There is a difference, but realizing that difference requires that one first respect the sense of community and salvation for which generations after generations of black people have gone to church.

That good actress Latanya Richardson (Mrs. Samuel L. Jackson) is relegated to the role of Sister Paulina Pritchett, an overly dogmatic church sister who first drives Faith Evans out of the church during the '80s and now wants to oust Beyonce's character. The filmmakers are crass to set up a situation where the other choir members, led by Darrin Hill, revolt and Richardson is voted out of the choir. It's a bizarrely unloving gesture that goes against the sense of solidarity and forgiveness that the black church is supposed to represent.

Nothing in The Fighting Temptation clicks. Nothing seems true to the way black people practice religion or choir members pursue their art. (Whoopi Goldberg's Sister Act films were more credible; that's why even grandmothers and church folk who seldom go to the movies liked them.) The cliché-ridden roles as whip-smart young folk that Gooding and Beyonce play prove that The Fighting Temptations doesn't even represent the current hip hop generation's resistance to the church; these roles don't represent anything real. (And the fully integrated Georgia church where most of the story takes place — featuring The Golden Girls' Rue McClanahan as one of the white members — can only be the idea of some wacked-out Hollywood producer.)

A movie this bad makes one paranoid. Was there a conspiracy to ruin the momentum of Beyonce's career — or to further bury Gooding's? Hollywood has obviously lost the humanist impulse that led King Vidor to improvise the great gospel-blues musical Hallelelujah! in 1929. The Fighting Temptations was obviously named to exploit the legendary status of the '60s Motown group The Temptations (although it makes no sense that a church choir would give itself such a bellicose label). Yet, no care was taken to give rhythm, flow, buoyancy or conviction to the gospel numbers. The director Lynn is best known for My Cousin Vinny, a flat undistinguished comedy. This has to be the most lunatic movie assignment since Sidney Lumet, director of the dramas Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico and Network, was hired to direct the movie musical The Wiz. Lunatic — and doomed.


First published: September 19, 2003

About the Author

Armond White is film critic for the New York Press. White was staff writer for The Nation for 12 years (1984-1996) and is the author of two books on pop culture.