by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All Rights Reserved
The film was A Day Late and a Dollar Short, a quite remarkable if overly melodramatic Lifetime
production with a (mostly) all-Black cast headed by Whoopi Goldberg (who’s also
credited as “executive producer,” a catch-all title which can mean virtually
anything from active creative involvement to just another slice of the pie for
a star) as Viola, matriarch of an extended African-American middle-class family
(the fact that anyone made a
movie about American Blacks who aren’t gang-bangers, welfare moms terrorized by
them, or hard-scrabble rural poor people scraping by like the one Whoopi played
in her star-making movie, The Color Purple, is a miracle in itself!) who as the movie begins is
facing the loss of both her husband (of 36 years, enough that their grown
children have teenage children of their own!) and her life. She’s losing her
life to chronic asthma brought on by a lifetime of smoking, and her husband
Cecil (Ving Rhames, for once playing a believable, multidimensional character
instead of a bad-ass killer or a comic-relief cliché) to what she (and we) at
first think is simple ennui but
turns out to have a more flesh-and-blood cause: Barbara, the town “welfare
widow” (this takes place somewhere in suburban Illinois), who’s a single mom
raising several kids of her own and when we meet her is also visibly pregnant
with a baby she claims is Cecil’s. Cecil has kept the family together and
provided for through the restaurant he co-owns with a business partner (who’s
carried on a non-serious flirtation with Viola for decades), only he’s got
restive in that life and he talks about selling their house, buying a boat and
sailing around the Caribbean. This isn’t exactly how Viola envisioned spending
their twilight years, both because her dream has always been to visit Paris (indeed, she named one of her
daughters “Paris” in honor of the French capital!) and because her family is so
relentlessly dysfunctional they still need her in her mom role.
Viola has three
daughters and a son, Lewis (Mekhi Phifer), who left his wife and son, has
ducked his child support and wasted his life drinking, getting into fights and
ending up arrested and in police custody — from which he’s just being released
as this movie begins. (In a nice touch, he’s shown checking out of jail with a
copy of a book by Sartre that he had on him when he was arrested: an indication
that he’s smarter than you’d think from the way he’s wasting his life.) The
daughters are Paris (Anika Noni Rose, the only cast member besides Goldberg and
Rhames I’d actually heard of before; she was the largely forgotten third member
of “The Dreams” — i.e., the Supremes — in the film Dreamgirls), a celebrity chef whose own stresses and marital
burn-out have led her to a prescription pill addiction; Charlotte (Tichina
Arnold), who seems to have a workable marriage going and who lords that fact
over Paris and is therefore thunderstruck when she learns her husband is having
an affair; and Janelle (Kimberly Elise), whose marriage to her daughter
Shanise’s (Shanise Banton) father broke up years before and who trusts her
second husband to provide for her and her daughter until … well, that would be
getting ahead of the story. A Day Late and a Dollar Short began life as a 2002 novel by Terry McMillan, an
African-American female author who specialized in creating stories about
relatively affluent Black women having essentially the same sorts of problems
and crises as relatively affluent white women; she got her 15 minutes of fame
in the early 1990’s with the novel Waiting to Exhale, about a quartet of young middle-class Black women
and their affairs with men. It was filmed in 1995 with Whitney Houston and
Angela Bassett as the stars and Forest Whitaker directing (during that long
interregnum between Bird and The
Last King of Scotland when he took up
direction because there were so few strong acting roles available for Black
men, and especially for Black men too heavy-set to be sexy), and McMillan went
on to a series of reliable best-sellers but not one that became another
blockbuster hit (though three of her other books were filmed and one, How
Stella Got Her Groove Back, did well enough
that its title reference became common slang).
A Day Late and a
Dollar Short turned out to be an
interesting movie but one with an all too common failing of Lifetime’s fare:
after a while, it just started to choke on its own melodrama. It’s hard to tell
how much of that is Terry McMillan’s fault and how much is the responsibility
of the screenwriter, Shernold Edwards (at least two major changes were made
between novel and film — I haven’t read the book but there’s a summary on
Wikipedia — Lewis’s history of being sexually abused as a child wasn’t
included, and Charlotte’s Gay son was dropped from the dramatis
personae; also the novel’s setting was Las
Vegas, but no doubt Lifetime wanted something more placid, more Middle
America-y and also easier to reproduce in Canada), but after a marvelous
opening in which Viola’s offspring reunite around her hospital bed — only to
argue so loudly that Viola’s doctor, worried that his patients’ kids are
putting such an emotional strain on her it’s going to hurt her chances for
recovery, grimly jokes to them, “You’re so loud the people in the parking lot
are beginning to take sides!” — one by one the kids are revealed to be
monumentally dysfunctional. Viola tries to match Paris up with landscape
architect Randall (Lyriq Bent, to my mind by far the sexiest male in the film)
and he’s interested in her, but when he catches her popping pills he recalls
his own history of addiction and the excuses he made for it and insists on
getting her to “a meeting,” which she not surprisingly rejects. When Lewis
takes off his son’s dirty shirt he notices his chest is bruised, and concludes
his ex-wife’s new husband is beating his son; and, being the hot-head he is, he
goes over to her home and confronts the guy — he’s white, a fact that’s been
carefully kept from us until we actually see him as an on-screen character, and
he informs Lewis that he’s going to raise the boy the way he sees fit and no drunk jailbird who’s bailed on his
child support is going to get in his way, whereupon Lewis hauls off and hits
the prick and is rewarded with a return to jail for his pains. Janelle has the
bitterest comeuppance of all when he walks in on her husband literally fucking her daughter — “Now it looks like a Lifetime movie!” I joked — and as if
her pill addiction wasn’t enough of a problem, Paris also has to deal with her
teenage son not only dating a rich white girl but knocking her up. Viola dies
just before the last commercial break, but if you think Whoopi Goldberg’s part
in this movie is over you’ve got another think coming: she’s left notes for all
her children and her husband to read to each other after she’s gone, and
through this rather transparent device she’s able to engineer a family
reconcilation and fix the lives of the other characters even from beyond the
grave — while her own vision of the afterlife is, you guessed it, dancing in
front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
Despite its weaknesses, A Day
Late and a Dollar Short is worth watching
largely for the fineness of the acting; however much Whoopi Goldberg had to do
with developing this project as well as appearing in it, it’s a welcome
reminder that she can act, that
she can do far more than her standup schtick and her earth-mother bit on the daytime TV show The
View. Her performance is magnificent and so
is Ving Rhames’; he’s an actor I’ve never much cared for, but that was probably
more due to the way he was cast than his intrinsic talent. He’s great as a good
but befuddled husband, facing the end of his marriage and the end of his wife’s
life well ahead of schedule (Viola’s age isn’t specified in the film but it’s
given in the book as 59), and all too aware of his responsibilities even if he
can’t always bring himself to live up to them. The other actors are all quite
fine; one sees the flaws in these people but still likes them and want to see
them prevail, and as manipulative as the story seemed sometimes I quite liked
it — even though, despite her success, it seems that Whoopi Goldberg was
ill-used in her film career (partly her own fault for taking parts she never
should have gone near, like Theodore
Rex) and it’s a special pity she never
played the role for which she seemed to have been made: a biopic of the great
Black comedienne Jackie “Moms” Mabley.
