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Sappy melodrama about race and relations

Who says Hollywood doesn't care about race? Never mind the uproar over the director and the star of Selma, the Martin Luther King Jr. historical drama, being stiffed for Oscar nominations. Never mind that there isn't a single person of color among the 20 acting nominees for the forthcoming Academy Awards.

Who says Hollywood doesn't care about race? Never mind the uproar over the director and the star of Selma, the Martin Luther King Jr. historical drama, being stiffed for Oscar nominations. Never mind that there isn't a single person of color among the 20 acting nominees for the forthcoming Academy Awards.

Kevin Costner and filmmaker Mike Binder are here to set things right.

In Black or White, a boldly sappy melodrama that plays on - and off - racial stereotypes, Costner is Elliot Anderson, grief stricken by the death of his wife in a car accident, now left to raise their impossibly cute grandchild, Eloise (Jillian Estell), on his own. The 7-year-old, who attends one of the best private schools in Los Angeles, is African American: Her father, Reggie (André Holland), has a record of drug and felony arrests and is not in the picture. Although, as things progress in this laughter-leavened custody-battle tearjerker, he becomes very much in the picture. (It's a thankless role, and Holland slinks through it, head bowed and jumpy.)

Eloise's mother, Elliot's daughter, died giving birth. She was just 17, and hid the pregnancy from her parents as long as possible. Elliot blames Reggie, older, a crack user, for corrupting his daughter, causing her death.

All this soap opera history ("inspired by true events," it says on the opening titles) makes relations between Elliot and Eloise's paternal grandmother, Rowena Jeffers (Octavia Spencer), rather strained. But in the aftermath of Carol Anderson's death (a beatific, ghostly Jennifer Ehle in a series of shameless visitations), "Grandma Wee-wee" is looking to move Eloise over to her neck of the woods in South Central L.A. She has a nice house, a thriving business, and a teeming family of happy nieces and nephews for Eloise to play with.

Elliot, a lawyer and fierce drinker, will have none of it. He huddles with his partners (Bill Burr plays his colleague and kind-of friend). He hires a math tutor for Eloise. With bookish spectacles and a briefcase full of copies of his CV and the papers he has published in academic journals, Duvan (Mpho Koaho), an African refugee Elliot found on Craigslist, provides Black or White with much-needed comic relief. He's like a character out of a Preston Sturges farce, if Sturges had written parts, aside from maids and train porters, for blacks.

Meanwhile, Rowena is huddling with her lawyer - her nephew Jeremiah Jeffers (Anthony Mackie), a take-no-prisoners counselor who wants to make the case all about race. His strategy: to paint Elliot as a bigot, a white man who should not be raising a black girl.

"This isn't about black and white, it's about right and wrong," insists Elliot, on the witness stand in the courtroom presided over by a black female judge (a droll Paula Newsome). But of course, Black or White is very much about just that - about our prejudices, and real and perceived divisions of class and culture.

In that sense, Binder's film, and Costner's boozy, stripped-bare performance (as emotional as the taciturn veteran gets) are daring things to behold. But oh, the bathos! The loony wrongheadedness of the screenplay! Do we really need the epic poolside knife fight between a dope-addled Reggie and a whiskey-soaked Elliot, a fight that could end very, very badly indeed?

But that would have been a different kind of movie. Not the brave and wondrous miscalculation we have before us, asking us, white and black, to consider what Black or White is really trying to say.

Black or White **1/2 (Out of four stars)

Directed by Mike Binder. With Kevin Costner, Octavia Spencer, Jillian Estell, Mpho Koaho, André Holland. Distributed by Relativity Media.

Running time: 2 hours, 1 min.

Parent's guide: PG-13 (profanity, drugs, alcohol, adult themes).

Playing at: area theaters.EndText