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'Something New' lives up to its name

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Something New" is something new: an interracial romance done responsibly, with humor and smarts.

That's not the same as something terrific. The acting's too uneven for that, and the standard inevitabilities of a romantic-comedy plot aren't avoided. Still, the film — about a successful African-American career woman who reluctantly becomes involved with a hunky white landscape architect — offers a number of clever observations and astute cultural grace notes about the state of race relations these days. Especially when it comes to romantic involvement.

Focus Features

'Something New'

B-

The verdict: Overall, this interracial comedy romance is a little too loosey-goosey, but it's also well-acted, funny and keenly observed.

Director: Sanaa Hamri
Starring: Sanaa Lathan, Simon Baker, Blair Underwood, Alfre Woodard, Mike Epps
Run time: 99 minutes
Release date: Feb. 3, 2005
Rating:PG-13 for sexual references.
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Kenya (Sanaa Lathan) has got it all. The big job. The beautiful new home. The bevy of supportive friends. Everything, that is, except the IBM — Ideal Black Man.

She isn't all that picky. Just someone "taller than me, college-educated and not crazy." But in a society where 42.4 percent of successful black career women never get married (according to the movie, at least), finding Mr. Right is harder than you'd think. Kenya finds, well, Mr. White. A matchmaking friend at work talks her into a blind date. He turns out to be Brian ("The Guardian's" Simon Baker) who's handsome, funny, sensitive, obviously interested in her — and white. He's game, but she's more thanks-but-no-thanks. Then they run into each other again...

The bulk of the movie is about the static — and support — Kenya gets from her friends and family. (Brian's personal life apparently consists of his golden retriever and a friendly Hispanic woman for whom he's created a neighborhood communal garden.)

Kenya's mother (Alfre Woodard) disapproves, but then she disapproves of everything her daughter does. Her new-woman-every-week playboy brother (Donald Faison) says she's sleeping with the enemy. When the couple double date with one of her friends, the comment is made, "I see you've brought your night light." Only her loving father (Earl Billings) seems to take a longer view. You're dating a white guy, he points out, not a Martian.

Director Sanaa Hamri and writer Kriss Turner keep things light for the most part, but ultimately they don't back away from the core issue. Kenya has her own doubts about what she's doing. It's not prejudice, she keeps telling herself, it's preference.

The couple's first big spat is a racial argument. At the end of a long day, he says he'd like to take a night off from talking about race, and she reads him the riot act. "You don't have to think about being white," she says. "Every day I'm in a room full of white people. That's what being black is about. You don't get a day off." It hits unexpectedly harsh in a movie where the leading man mouths dialogue like, "I take hard earth and make things bloom." Ouch.

Brian is a little too much like a romance-novel lover — a little too dreamboaty to be true. He wears manly-man working clothes and urges Kenya to let her hair go natural. But Baker pulls it of because 1) he's a good actor and 2) he and Lathan have sensational chemistry together. Lathan is lovely, too. After being stuck in movies like "Alien vs. Predator" and "Brown Sugar," she finally gets to tackle a multifaceted character. She's quite good, creating a woman who's as insecure as she is proud.

"Something New" is easier to praise for what it attempts than what it accomplishes. That said, in a racially skittish nation where the most recent studio movie about interracial relations was the abysmal "Guess Who," this film has the kind of guts we rarely see in mainstream movies. And it's romantic, too.