Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
With a title that pretty much accurately encapsulates my feelings towards it, and of most people, it would seem, Bamboozled drops us into the lap of Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), a TV executive working under station boss and all-round jackass Thomas Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport) who dismisses his show ideas as Cosby clones, pushing for something a bit more… I believe “urban” would be the euphemism, were this a record store.
Exasperated, Pierre enlists two street entertainers, Savion Glover’s Manray and Tommy Davidson’s Womack, to star in a radical new pilot that will show Dunwitty his error by taking his request to the illogical extreme, and resurrecting the minstrel shows of, actually, not all that long ago, but this time with African Americans in blackface.
So far, so Producers, particularly when it becomes, in defiance of all logic and reason, successful, with any intended satire going roundly unnoticed by the general public, but Pierre soon gets over his disgust and learns to enjoy the glory, much to the disgust of his PA, Jada Pinkett Smith’s Sloan Hopkins.
The back half of the film deals with Womack and Manray’s increasing misgivings about their line of work, and the balance of their self respect and bank balance, before everything comes to an entirely out of place end courtesy of Mos Def’s militant hip hop collective, and I guarantee you’ll be left wondering why it was decided to move from a comedy to melodrama midway through production.
Now, I’m a little puzzled, as it says here that this was shot on MiniDV, but I would swear that this was actually recorded on a potato, with sound recorded on a smaller potato and mixed on, at best, a chip, or “freedom fry”, as I believe they are called in the USA. Perhaps the recent Criterion release cleans this up, but this film is to my recollection the only film I’ve ever had to radically tweak the EQ on just to have a slight chance of hearing what people are saying. We’ve mentioned Lee’s tendency to go overboard on the underscoring, and this is so far the absolute nadir of it.
While Damon Wayans has been scientifically proven to be the least objectionable Wayans family member, using the scientific process of science, he’s not a magician, and there’s not enough material to work with, especially when dragged out over one hundred and thirty five minutes, and using a delivery that gets irritating after about ten of those minutes.
There’s a message in here, for sure, but even accounting for Lee’s typical straightforward delivery of that message this is a bludgeoning, such that what I take as the actual point, the lack of a varied and complete range of opportunities for African Americans in the studio system, is almost buried under the deluge of minstrel and related artefacts that show up in the closing reels, or potato peels, or whatever the equivalent should be in my theoretical tuber-based production pipeline.
I didn’t hate Bamboozled, and as with a lot of Lee’s work the central arguments it’s making are depressingly just as valid now as they were then, but between the haphazard presentation, confused tone and just-way-too-long-icity of the piece, I’d not be recommending this to anyone.