The Intouchables — a French film with a
not-quite-English title — by the team of Olivier Nakache and Eric
Toledano (Those Happy Days) turns out to be a rather good
illustration of the gulf between critical opinion and popular
taste. Both
A.O. Scott of the New York Times and
David Denby of the New Yorker call the movie “an
embarrassment,” while Jay
Weissberg of Variety goes even further and calls
it “offensive.” Et pourquoi? Because of the dreaded
“stereotype” of a happy, vital, life-loving but criminal black
servant and the impotent, stiff and hidebound white master who must
learn from his supposed inferior how to live. This amounts, in the
words of Mr. Weissberg to “the kind of Uncle Tom racism one hopes
has permanently exited American screens.”
Gosh! I guess there’s at least one way in which we can consider
ourselves as being more enlightened than the French. But the idea
seems to me an entirely silly one. Call the movie’s set-up a cliché
if you like, but Uncle Tom racism? What does that even mean? Is any
black man who takes a job working for a rich white guy
automatically an Uncle Tom and therefore complicit in an oppressive
system analogous to slavery? Or is anyone who creates a character
in any way similar to a racial stereotype himself a racist, ipso
facto? Clearly, most people don’t think so, unless you suppose (as
some people like to do) that most people are racist. The
Intouchables was enormously popular in France, and, for a
foreign-language film only showing on a few screens, it is also
very popular in here in the U.S. It’s almost as if ordinary people
don’t care if the characters are stereotypes.
Of course, speaking as a critic myself, I should stick up for
the honor of the profession and the right of the critic to tell
people — as F.R. Leavis is supposed to have told his barber on the
latter’s incautious confession to a liking for the novels of Arnold
Bennett — that they only think they like the rubbish they
claim to have a taste for. But I can’t help thinking that sometimes
the popular taste can be truer than the more cultivated kind,
especially where the latter is cultivated primarily by political
correctness. Mr. Scott, for example, can’t help sort of liking the
movie in spite of himself, which ought to be a giveaway that he
feels constrained to defer, as so many of us do, to the racial
grievance industry.
Part of the reason for the film’s popularity is the
attractiveness of its two central characters. Omar Sy plays the
Senegalese Driss, a petty criminal and welfare chisler with a
complicated home-life, while François Cluzet plays the rich-guy,
Philippe, who has been paralyzed from the neck down in a
paragliding accident and who needs more or less constant
attendance. When one of Philippe’s rich friends warns him against
the sudden caprice by which he decides to hire Driss — who has
only applied for the job because of the demands of the welfare
bureaucracy that he prove he is looking for work — in spite of his
manifest unsuitability for this or pretty much any other job, he
says, “These street guys have no pity.”
“That’s what I want,” replies Philippe. “No pity.”
It’s a little too neat, like everything else about the picture.
But that doesn’t make it worthless. The opening scene shows us
Driss driving Philippe in the latter’s Maserati. But we don’t know
this yet. Out of context, we can’t tell what to make of this young
black guy and a complaisant older white guy (it’s not immediately
clear that he is paralyzed), trying to outrun the cops, the former
betting the latter 100 Euros that he can lose them and then, when
he is caught, betting another 200 Euros that he can get them to
give him an escort instead of arresting him — which he proceeds to
do by persuading them that his white companion is suffering from a
life-threatening emergency. The white guy goes along with the
imposture by pretending to have some kind of fit.
Like naughty children, the two rejoice at their success in
hoodwinking the authority figures and so suggest a typically French
sense of the romance of criminal behavior. Later, the two of them
smoke some dope together and concoct a clever fraud exploiting the
credulity and sensationalism of the art market, but in a way that
popular philistinism will find particularly congenial. If there is
a cliché here it is more Rousseau (or even Cocteau) than Harriet
Beecher Stowe. Moreover, if Philippe has to learn to loosen up from
Driss, Driss has to learn from Philippe some of the habits of good
citizenship and diligence in filling a place in the productive
economy instead of merely seeking to live off welfare benefits.
This makes for a more interesting and entertaining scenario than
the merely clichéd one, but I suspect that it is also what, more
than any putative racism, really gets up the nose of the
politically correct.
