Lakeview Terrace

Remember that Eddie Murphy line in 48 Hrs? “I’m your worst nightmare: a black man with a badge.” (That’s the family friendly broadcast TV version.)

In Lakeview Terrace Samuel L Jackson is Abel Turner, a long-standing officer with the LAPD, and he’s the source of sleepless nights for newlyweds Chris and Lisa Mattson (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington). At first it’s simply because his security lights are turned up too high, they flood into the newlyweds’ bedroom window (they’ve just moved in and haven’t got up any blinds yet). But this minor neighbourly dispute proves to be a symptom of something uglier and potentially threatening…

On the face of it Neil LaBute’s latest is a throwback to the yuppie-in-peril type thriller popular in the early 90s – when young married couples were routinely terrorized by manic, knife-wielding ex-lovers, bosses, and next door neighbours. It was hard to be young and affluent back then.

What does Abel have against the Mattsons? Chris intuits the truth first: he doesn’t want a mixed race couple in his neighbourhood.

You could shoot the script for Lakeview Terrace and reverse the colour scheme, so that Abel was played by, say, Bruce Willis, and the Mattisons were Julia Stiles and Mekhi Phifer and scarcely change a word, but no question, it’s better this way, with the black man as the voice of conservatism.

Cleverly, the movie roots Abel’s attitudes in parental anxiety. He’s not some redneck bigot, he’s a widower, a strict father to his two young daughters who doesn’t just object to Chris’s colour, he’s disdainful of his permissive, liberal attitudes – the way he sneaks a cigarette outside the house because he’s banned from smoking inside (and thoughtlessly leaves the incriminating evidence as litter on the driveway). He hates it that his daughters see their neighbours making out in the pool. At the Mattison’s house-warming party their friends light up a spliff. The cop lectures them and excuses himself. Yes, he’s a hard-ass, but what would you have a policeman do in those circumstances? (In another nice touch, Lisa’s father also seems unimpressed with his son-in-law.)

All this is established with an unusual degree of care and intelligence by Neil LaBute. Even the blatant symbol of a raging California wild fire that starts out across the valley in the distance and gets closer and closer as the drama heats up seems valid in the circumstances (as I write this, another fire is laying waste to a wide swathe of luxury homes across the south of the State). Incidentally, it’s presumably no accident that Lake View Terrace is the neighbourhood where Rodney King was pulled over and beaten by LA cops, perhaps the single most inflammatory racial incident of the last 20 years.

It would be fair to say I went into this movie with minimal expectations. I haven’t liked a single Neil LaBute movie – the misanthropy (not just misogyny) of In The Company Of Men and Nurse Betty leaves me cold, and his direction often clumsy and stiff (see last year’s dreadful remake The Wicker Man). He doesn’t have a script credit on this one, but I’d be surprised if he hadn’t done his own draft. The dialogue is much better than the pulpy premise.

It’s an extremely well directed movie too, at least for the first hour, the characters’ frustrations building up with the tension as Chris and Abel feel each other out, pushing buttons, a kind of psychological wrestling match in which Abel’s badge gives him considerable leverage. The acting is top notch by the way: Jackson finding extraordinary muscle even when he barely flexes a finger; Wilson, even braver, allowing us to doubt his character will have the strength to stand up to the pressure. (There’s a great scene where Chris just sits in his car and smokes – the patience and reality of this moment is one of the best things I’ve seen at the movies this year.)

Having said all that, I have to add that the whole show goes up in smoke in the last half hour, when Lakeview Terrace reverts to the crude, hyperbolic thriller it always seemed destined to be. So it goes. But this movie is worth seeing, and seems to me a more honest and provocative picture than Paul Haggis’s Oscar-winning Crash.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com