A racial drama, cast as mystery
“Luce” poses questions around assumptions we make about each other
“Luce” is a gripping drama for about 100 minutes, but it’s 109 minutes long, and its ending is a disappointment. The movie establishes itself as a thriller and seems to be playing by that set of rules, but then it switches gears into something else entirely, something not nearly as satisfying. Still, it’s impossible to dismiss a movie that breaks its leg so close to the finish line.
The racial dynamics are interesting in this one. Luce (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) is an honors student, slated to become the valedictorian of his high school. As a child, he was a boy soldier in Africa, and then was adopted by a white couple (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth) in America. Everything is going along fine. Luce’s teachers treat him like he’s great, and then one day his mother gets a phone call from a teacher, Ms. Wilson (Octavia Spencer), who wants a face-to-face meeting.
The teacher has two areas of concern. The first is a paper written by Luce. He was asked to assume the identity of someone in history and write an essay in their voice, and so he chose a terrorist who believes it’s OK to kill people for political ends. The second is a bag of powerful illegal fireworks found in Luce’s locker. Ms. Wilson is concerned about
the slim possibility that Luce might be planning to blow something up.
That’s a good starting point. The warning signs are ambiguous. And then gradually we learn more. Luce is a smart young man, very shrewd, with a practiced mode of self-presentation. Is he a sociopath? At one point, he seems to threaten Ms. Wilson, but he does it in such a way that no recounting of the incident can convey the full nature of the threat. Meanwhile, Mom (Watts) is fierce in her defense of Luce, though even she is beginning to wonder.
Gradually, the movie starts to suggest that Luce’s troubles might be due to the unreasonably high expectations that white America places on talented young black men. Luce feels that he must be regarded either as the next Obama or as a gangster, because people are more interested in him as a stereotype than as a human being.
This is an interesting subject and worth an entire movie. But shoehorning this idea into the story of a boy who grew up in an African country, where he was abused and taught to kill people, doesn’t really make sense. It would, after all, border on the absurd to suggest that a lot of dedicated teachers, white and black, putting pressure on a young man to get into a great college might be as destabilizing for him — and more an instigator of his strange behavior — than his horrific childhood as a 7-year-old killer. Yet it’s entirely possible that this is what the movie is saying.
Spencer seems to bring the teacher’s life history with her into every scene — with this performance and “Ma,” she is having a great year. But all the performances here are full and committed, which speaks well of director Julius Onah.
But however good the acting, and however smart or questionable the movie’s ideas are, a drama is all about drama. And there’s no escaping the fact that, after a promising beginning, middle and almost end, “Luce” trails off into dramatic nothingness. We expect a crescendo and we end up with an ellipsis.