by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched a Lifetime movie called With This
Ring, essentially a modern-day equivalent
of a “race” movie from the 1930’s and 1940’s in that the character leads are
all Black and they seem to move in a hermetically sealed world where they’re
able to socialize exclusively with other Black people and almost never
encounter anyone white. Lifetime promoted this one heavily on the basis of the
gimmick that the three female leads — talent agent Trista (Regina Hall), gossip
columnist Viviane (Jill Scott — the great soul singer, probably the best
“belter” between Aretha Franklin and Jennifer Hudson, is used in a role that
doesn’t allow her to sing!) and aspiring actress Amaya (played by someone
billed on imdb.com only as “Eve”) — make a pact on the New Year’s Eve their
friend Elise (Brooklyn Sudano) is being married and decide that within the year
all three of them will tie the knot, either to someone they’ve met during that
time or, if they can’t find a suitable man, to the not particularly exciting
but good-enough men they’re dating. At the start of the film Trista is having a
sexual quickie with Damon (Brian White), whom she’s broken up with but still
gets together with for hot times even though she doesn’t consider him marriage
material. Viviane has a troubled relationship with Sean (Jason George) —
they’re not a couple anymore but they’re stuck with each other because they
have a son and are at least trying to be responsible parents and both take an
interest in the boy’s life — and Amaya is dating a married man named Keith and
trying to get him to leave his wife for her. Alas, writer-director Nzingha
Stewart (bearing one of those oddball first names that’s either genuinely
African or a jumble of letters either she or her parents concocted to sound African) doesn’t do as much with this story as she
could have, veering between light-hearted romantic comedy and drama and not
doing either particularly well. It’s a film of moments rather than a totality,
and most of the best moments involve Amaya: she makes an appearance dressed as
a catfish (for a commercial advertising a Black-oriented fast-food outlet; the
shoot required her to do 10 takes in which she bit into a foul-tasting catfish
sandwich and had to pretend this was the best-tasting fare in the world) and later
she crashes a party Keith is giving and is thrown out, but not before she
catches Keith’s wife making out with another guy and she thinks she has them
dead to rights until the woman (who’s considerably sexier than Amaya is!)
explains that she and Keith both have an open relationship but keep it on the
Q.T. because he’s a bigshot executive at some corporation or another and the
news that he and his wife were not sexually exclusive with each other could
derail his career. (Nonetheless, Amaya gets a smartphone photo of Keith’s wife
and her boyfriend together and leaks it to Viviane in hopes she’ll put it on
her Web site and screw up Keith’s marriage.)
After a series of complications
neither as funny nor as moving as Stewart thought they were, eventually Viviane
decides to marry Sean; Amaya gets lost in the shuffle but seems to have
succeeded in landing Keith after his divorce (not that he seems like such a
prize package); and Trista has been through the romantic as well as the career
wringer. She landed a role in a coveted independent film for Black superstar
Terrence Robb (not identified on the imdb.com page) and thought he would be the great love of her life — only she went
to his house to break the news to him and found him in the middle of a party
complete with bowls of pills and scantily clad people of both genders
ministering to the great man’s physical needs, including a queeny masseur named
Mikiko (Jason Rogel) indiscriminately spraying Terrence and his guests with
massage oil. Trista fainted at the sight of these goings-on and Terrence had
her fired by her agency (the supercilious guy she was working for is the only
significant white character in the film), but not to worry: like the leads of Hot
Rhythm, she and Nate (Stephen Bishop) literally run into each other in the agency’s hallway and end
up setting up a talent management business which lands Amaya a supporting role
in Terrence’s movie after Viviane obtains photos of that wild party (courtesy
of Mikiko) and threatens to publish them if Amaya doesn’t get the part. At the end Trista resigns herself to
marry Damon, only Nate shows up at the wedding and Trista gets cold feet,
though in the end she doesn’t hook up with Nate either but decides to remain
single and not define herself by a relationship with a man. (A pity; Stephen
Bishop is hardly as sexy as Brian White but he’s playing a far more grounded
character and it’s clear Nzingha Stewart thinks he and Trista do belong together.) With This Ring seems in part to be a propaganda piece aimed at
encouraging upper-middle-class Black women to look for upper-middle-class Black
men instead of dating white guys — they do exist, Stewart seems to be telling her sisters — and it’s also one of
those how-far-we’ve-come films in that it shows that African-American actors definitely have equal access to the same screenwriters’ cliché
bank as white ones, but it’s not a great movie and it’s hardly the good clean
dirty fun it could have been!
