2003’s Bringing Down The House was built on a foundation of regressive stereotypes
Bringing Down The House ostensibly takes place in 2003, the year it was released. But culturally, it seems to take place sometime between JFK’s inauguration and The Beatles’ first American show. That’s appropriate, since the film—which earned $130 million domestically and become 2003’s 13th-biggest grosser—is a product of Disney’s Touchstone imprint, whose comedies tend toward blandly upbeat, pop-music-saturated efforts with the look and feel of Disney’s live-action offerings from the 1960s and 1970s, the kind that starred Dean Jones and involved some manner of supernatural or animal-related hijinks. Directed by Adam Shankman, Bringing Down The House has the Touchstone comedy house style down pat: a smooth jazz score (from Lalo Schifrin), bright lighting, peppy pacing, and broad, hammy performances from movie stars typecast to perfection. It’s a race- and culture-clash comedy as bland and hopelessly Caucasian as a Yankee Candle store.share
The film begins with divorced tax attorney Peter Sanderson (Steve Martin) flirting blandly with a woman calling herself “lawyer-girl” on a legal message board. Peter engages in the kind of mild deception endemic to online flirtation, making himself seem younger and less white-haired than he actually is. “Lawyer-girl,” meanwhile, engages in the kind of extreme online deception more common in the television program Catfish, sending Peter an image that implies she’s thin, young, white, and blonde. But Peter doesn’t realize “lawyer-girl” isn’t the woman at the center of the image: She’s the large, angry black woman being arrested in the corner of the frame.
Of course, no one has themselves photographed being arrested, and if they do, they certainly don’t hold on to that image and use it to attract suitors. Online, people tend to use images of how they looked on their best day, not how they looked while being arrested for armed robbery. But if not for this contrivance, Bringing Down The House wouldn’t exist, and the world would be spared a level of offensive stereotyping not seen since Mickey Rooney was fitted for buck teeth in Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
“Lawyer-girl” turns out to not be the professional Peter was expecting, but rather Charlene (Queen Latifah), who begins shouting incomprehensible slang at him as soon as they meet. Peter is mortified to discover that the white woman of his dreams is actually black, though the film is just diplomatic enough to put his extreme discomfort in terms of class, propriety, and language rather than race. The problem, the film makes clear, isn’t that Peter is associating with a black woman. If she looked like Halle Berry and wore conservative business suits, the shrill culture-clash at the film’s center wouldn’t register.
No, Peter is mortified by Charlene because she’s loud, vulgar, overtly sexual, and communicates via head shaking, shouting, and long strings of nonsensical Ebonics. She behaves in broadly stereotypical, flashy, and attention-grabbing ways instead of trying to assimilate her way into a respectable position as a paralegal, the position Peter feels she might aspire to if she really applies herself, buckles down, and stops with all that street foolishness.
Bringing Down The House later establishes that Charlene is an escaped convict on the run, rather than the ex-con she presents herself as being. Yet from the moment Charlene meets Peter, she behaves as conspicuously as possible, which extends to throwing a large party for her friends at Peter’s home. When Peter attempts to kick Charlene out of his home upon her arrival, she begins screaming things like, “You told me I was your little African queen, and I loved-ed you for that!” and taunts Peter for neglecting their nonexistent progeny, a “little chocolate-vanilla swirl from that magical night at the crack house!”
The film stacks the deck by surrounding Peter with unabashed racists and people so obsessed with propriety that they see the appearance of an uptight, suit-wearing white man like Peter alongside a large black woman as such a bizarre anomaly that it must be confronted and explained constantly. The primary exception is Peter’s friend and affiliate Howie Rottman (Eugene Levy), a skirt-chasing womanizer who gazes at Peter’s unwanted houseguest for the first time and instantly falls into a state of lust with her, to the accompaniment of “Jungle Love.” In any other film, introducing a glib interracial romance with a song called “Jungle Love” would represent a horrifying low. For Bringing Down The House, it’s pretty much par for the course, and representative of the film’s “Who gives a shit?” attitude toward issues of racial sensitivity.