'Life,' Mightier Than the Pen By Stephen Hunter Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 16, 1999

Eddie Murphy, right, and Martin Lawrence are in it for the long haul in "Life." (Universal) Director: Ted Demme Cast: Martin Lawrence; Eddie Murphy; Lisa Nicole Carson; Nick Cassavetes; Noah Emmerich; Poppy Montgomery; Clarence Williams; Bokeem Woodbine; Obba Babatunde Running Time: 1 hour, 49 minutes Violence, profanity and sexual innuendo

Hell, in this case, is Camp No. 8 of the Mississippi State Prison archipelago, a Devil's Island in the Delta where the two are consigned in 1932 after a casual frame-up by a racist lawman. And they find it's a road that goes nowhere very slowly, as the movie chronicles their 60 years behind the gun line.

Yet the movie is surprisingly free of rancor and hatred. Two innocent black men, railroaded into a brutal penal farm system, tormented not merely by the bulls, the heat, the savagery of the place, but also by what could have been theirs and never was? Spike Lee would turn it into a napalm strike on the body politic. John Singleton would use it as a grenade.

But this director, Ted Demme, turns Murphy's own original story, in its best aspect, into an essay on endurance and dignity. In that sense it is of a piece with other African American odysseys of survival over the long haul, through the thick and thin of an ugly history, like "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" or "Driving Miss Daisy."

It has a strain of nobility to it: Claude and Ray never give up. They remain committed to their ideal of freedom and to each other – though they have a spat and don't talk for 10 years – and they try this thing and that. The trying keeps them human. They don't let – this is their triumph, and the movie's signal accomplishment – a monstrous system turn them into monsters.

Ray (Murphy) is the hustler – con man, pickpocket, bootlegger, thief – who in the Harlem high renaissance of 1932 runs afoul of nightclub owner Spanky Johnson on the same night that good-soldier workingman Claude (Lawrence) loses his money and can't pay his bill. (The reason: Ray has picked his pocket.) Spanky gives them a choice: Go south to pick up a booze shipment, or go swimming with the help of 30 yards of tightly wound rope.

So it's to the South they go, but this is also the moment the film first displays its chronically slipshod tendencies. The two get in big bad trouble fast in Mississippi because neither of them seems quite to get what's going on in the Jim Crow South. Does this sound possible? Would African Americans of 1932, whose grandparents would have been slaves, somehow not get it? But they waltz into a whites-only diner and are stunned when they are refused service (though it is a hilarious scene, especially when Claude says, "All right, then, if I can't have white pie, can I have some Negro pie?"). They think they'll get an honest game of poker in a honky-tonk saloon from a gambler named Winston who smokes cigars. Then they think the white sheriff will help them straighten out the mixup they've gotten into regarding that now-dead gambler.

So they go from free men to lifers in the blink of an eye without doing much to prevent it. But this of course gets them where the movie wants them and frees them for its deepest pleasure, which might be called the power of the rant. Both Murphy and Lawrence are great ranters, and Demme is wise enough to sit back and watch them work and let us enjoy the bubbling of their chemistry. The rage they feel for what life has dealt them transmutes – through the alchemy of a system built on denying that anger – into rage at other, smaller things: other convicts, the food, finally each other.

Murphy will open with a glissando of vitriol, a rising accumulation of the metaphor of hostility, as his verbal confabulations get wilder, more surrealist, more free-floating. He does a thing on the theme of "not giving up your cornbread to the big guy" that's not to be seen, it's to be survived.

Lawrence, on the other hand, is less incendiary. He doesn't quite have the verbal explosiveness, the poet's crazed genius, but he's the specialist in the slow burn, the self-believing rationalist who can never understand why his plans don't quite work. He's continually frustrated because he keeps expecting things to make sense, which of course, for a black convict in a Southern swamp, they never can. But that makes a point: He has clung to the core of his personality as an honest man, which gives him a rock upon which to moor his psychology. That's his survivor's talent.

There is much "wrong" with "Life" in the formal sense. It's too episodic and the episodes are intermittent in their effectiveness. Things come and go too fast. One episode tells the story of a gifted black ballplayer (Bokeem Woodbine as "Can't Get Right") whose skill as a long-ball hitter suggests the possibility of a life beyond prison. Another deals with the final arrival of justice to the person of the sheriff who originally sent them up all those years ago. A framing story, which is set up to narrate events as recollection rather than in the present tense, builds to a "surprise ending" that will surprise only the dimmest. Meanwhile the years simply flee by.

But what's right about it should be recognized also. It almost seems like a tribute from Murphy to the men who came before him. It recognizes that those earlier black generations lived in a different world and were locked in a more tragic prison than Camp No. 8. It was a Devil's Island called Repression, where all the signposts read: "Anger Not Permitted on Pain of Death." They couldn't articulate their fury but had to tunnel deep into their souls and hide it. The system that oppressed them was immutable as the Earth itself. No vocabulary existed by which they could express themselves, other than the blues, the big train or bus north and, as Claude and Ray must choose, the act of abiding. Stuck as they were, the options were only bitterness and self-loathing or dignity, living on your own terms, not letting the Man get inside your head and crush your spirit. That's the victory of Ray and Claude and that's what gives the movie its poignancy despite so many fumbled opportunities.