Remake puts a new spin on an updated classic, and plays it for laughs

01:00 AM EST on Friday, March 25, 2005

BY MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

Guess Who is a modern twist -- sort of -- on the 1967 Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

In that film, Tracy and Hepburn played a pair of liberal San Franciscan parents whose politics were challenged to the core when their daughter brought home a black fiancé (Sidney Poitier). Poitier played a charming doctor who sort of allayed the deep concerns of the parents in what became a hugely popular social melodrama.

Nearly four decades later the tables have been turned. Now it's an upper middle class black family living in suburban New Jersey who are more than surprised when their daughter brings home a white fiancé. That the father, Percy Jones, is played by refrigerator-sized comic Bernie Mac means there must be fireworks and some brimstone, too. There won't be any pussyfooting around the delicate topics of bigotry and racism here, as there was in the oh-so earnest Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? whose niceties kept everything on a tea party level.

"I expected Denzel Washington to walk in, not Whitey McWhitey," snarls Percy when he first gets a load of his daughter's "pigment-challenged" boyfriend.

"We taught our girls to only see people, not color," counters Percy's wife, Marilyn (Judith Scott), in an attempt to calm her husband down. But, of course, as in Meet the Parents, which is more akin to Guess Who than Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, things don't always go smoothly. Not with Mac steamrollering his way through every situation.

Not only is Simon Green (Ashton Kutcher) white, on this very day he has chosen to "meet the parents" he has quit his high-paying job as a Wall Street investment banker. The fact that Simon is keeping this news a secret from everyone, including his intended bride, Theresa (Zoe Saldana), adds another dimension to the complications in store. Simon and Theresa have decided to announce their engagement at her parents' 25th wedding anniversary, a plan that seems increasingly dicey as events in this household unfold.

The imposing Mac keeps everyone on edge in a film that director Kevin Rodney Sullivan (Barbershop 2, How Stella Got Her Groove Back) balances between farce and social comedy. Some things work wonderfully. A sequence in which Percy beds down next to Simon to keep the lad from Theresa's room is a series of funny nighttime snapshots of the two entangled on a pull-out sofa bed. Other moments don't quite hit on all cylinders. Percy and Simon challenging each other in go-karts on an oval track in their own mini-NASCAR event never quite gets up to speed and ends on an oddly flat note that should have been hilarious.

But most things do work in Guess Who. Hilarious is the word for an awkward dinner party sequence in which Percy eggs Simon to join him in exchanging racially charged jokes. As the jokes move ever closer to the edge of bad taste, things get very edgy indeed.

Kutcher has the befuddled look of a man who is in over his head, uncertain how to respond to Percy's badgering and loaded questions. "Whatever I say is taken the wrong way," he moans in his growing anxiety. He's a sympathetic character , although he's not quite honest in harboring that secret about his job status. It's a powderkeg that you know will blow up and it adds a note of suspense to an otherwise well-plotted script.

Saldana is a dream come true as Theresa, however; considerate, caring, loving, passionate about her relationship with Simon, and lovely on top of it. There's never any doubt why Simon fell in love with her. When those secrets and white lies foam to the surface, she's crushed and we can feel her pain.

For all its jokes and sight gags, Guess Who offers a more honest look at racism and interracial marriage than the ever-so-solemn and sometimes preachy Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? It shows how far we've come in racial relations in nearly four decades . . . and how much territory there is still to cross.

Guess Who has its solemn, heartfelt moments, too. But it has the good sense to temper them with laughter, which makes the message go down much easier.

****

Guess Who

Starring: Bernie Mac, Ashton Kutcher, Zoe Saldana, Judith Scott.

Rated: PG-13, contains adult themes.