“You need to comb out my hair.” Seven-year-old Eloise (Jillian Estell) plops down on her bed, waiting. Her grandfather, Elliot (Kevin Costner), holds her excellent pink hairbrush awkwardly in his hand and wonders out loud, “You can’t do that yet?” He goes on to do the deed, as painfully as possible, owing to the facts that he’s not only never done this for the child who’s lived with him for her entire life, but he’s also desperately hung over.
Elliot has good reason to be hung over, or so you’re led to believe in Black or White. His beloved wife Carol (Jennifer Ehle) died the previous evening, following an off-screen car crash. The film offers less good reason for Elliot’s ineptitude and inexperience with the granddaughter he so plainly adores: he needs a visible, visceral starting point for his education. That education starts with the combing and subsequent tying of hair bows; his first efforts produce pained grimaces and patient instruction. He then proceeds with a custody case filed by Eloise’s grandmother, Rowena (Octavia Spencer), who argues, essentially, that Elliot’s lasting resentment of Eloise’s father and her son, the crack addict Reggie (André Holland), makes him a poor parental figure for a black child.
While Rowena wants to move Eloise to Compton, where she lives with assorted children, siblings, and cousins, Elliot insists that it’s better for her to live in his expensive Los Angeles home and attend the private school where she’s a star student and has friends. (The latter claim is only heard, however, not seen: the film doesn’t go flesh out Eloise’s experiences, at school or with other kids apart from her cousins.) It’s not the first time Compton has served as a sign instead of a place or an experience in a movie, but the representation looms here like that first hair-combing. This is where the black people live, the movie says, where Elliot feels so uncomfortable he has to get stumbling drunk before he can visit. As his drinking becomes more pronounced and Rowena’s devotion to Reggie becomes blinding, you might be wondering why no one in the movie notices the thematic parallel between Elliot and Reggie’s addictions. It appears that they all need education.
It’s not a terrible thing that Elliot is a complicated man, nor is it bad that he bears residual pain over his 17-year-old daughter’s death in childbirth. To some degree, it is understandable that he resents Reggie for being older than and reckless with her, as well as the fact that he loves Eloise unconditionally but also holds a grudge against Rowena for being Reggie’s mother. Those struggling with the problem of privilege can relate to his inability to take responsibility for the racism he’s absorbed. All that being said, Black or White is less interested in exploring that complexity than in spelling it out in structuring Elliot’s many issues in obvious bits of narrative and imagery.
That is, Black or White uses Elliot’s education — also Rowena’s, and maybe Reggie’s — to teach you, rather than, say, to tell a set of stories. The film uses a number of clumsy devices to this end, including Carol’s occasional encouraging-haunting of Elliot (Ehle reprising something of her role as the similarly encouraging-haunting dead wife in the TV show A Gifted Man) and Elliot’s hiring of a tutor for Eloise, the West African-born Duvan (Mpho Koaho), whose backstory (family slaughtered in a village raid) and comic-reliefy function are alternately minimized or downright painful.
Black or White also hauls out some excessively familiar devices, including Elliot’s counsel in the custody case, the earnest white colleague (Bill Reynolds), and slick black opposing counsel (Rowena’s brother Jeremiah, played by Anthony Mackie), not to mention the wise black lady judge (Paula Newsome) who takes no nonsense in her courtroom… until, of course, she takes some nonsense.
Her courtroom is key, occasioning the climax for the struggle between Elliot and himself. Specifically, he must explain on the whiteness stand how it is that he came to call Reggie a “little street nigger”, a moment in the movie that is initially shocking and then collapses under the weight of far too much explanation. For the movie to deliver your education, it reduces the potential complexity of Elliot’s anger, intelligence, and many contexts (even suggesting that his ostensibly obvious alcoholism might not be what it looks like). Instead, it asks you to believe Elliot absolutely, to empathize with him over and against Eloise’s perpetually fidgety, sniffling crackhead dad, whose own courtroom confessional is far less developed and far more damning. For all Eloise’s efforts to teach him — in combing out hair, in driving to school, or raising seven-year-olds — Elliot remains that most familiar movie hero, the well-meaning white guy.