New York in living colour

Black And White (18)| Director: James Toback | Starring: Brooke Shields, Robert Downey Jr, Mike Tyson | 99 Mins Duets (15) | Director: Bruce Paltrow | Starring: Huey Lewis, Gwyneth Paltrow, Andre Braugher | 114 Mins

The Big Picture

The Big Picture

James Toback's engrossing Black and White is an edgy bulletin from the New York melting pot. Filming in a restless, on-the-hoof style, Toback examines a strange state of interdependence between privileged white kids who idolise the outlaw cool of black hip-hop stars, who in turn see these kids as a potential crossover audience and a quicker route to the big bucks. The mood is set early on when a white teenage girl, Charlie (Bijou Phillips), goes from a sweaty interracial grope in Central Park to a supper of quails in her parents' Upper West Side apartment. It foreshadows a story in which culture and identity mingle freely but uneasily, and mutual exploitation is the name of the game.

Toback frames this by having an ambitious documentary-maker (Brooke Shields) follow around a group of white kids who have attached themselves to a Staten Island hip-hop crew (the music is by the rap collective Wu-Tang Clan). King of this scene is a career criminal-cum-impresario named Rich (Oli "Power" Grant) who lazily presides over his court of brothers and white lackeys, one of whom he eventually recruits as a hitman.

This awed deference of white to black is dramatised in the film's funniest and riskiest sequence when Shields' husband, Terry (Robert Downey Jr), who is gay, makes a pass at a black celebrity. That the celebrity happens to be Mike Tyson, lends the moment a grotesque fascination; Tyson at first tries to be polite ("I'm on parole, man") but goaded by Terry's mixture of servility and impudence, he makes absolutely sure he's not pestered again. (At least he didn't get bitten.) Tyson, eyes glittering like his teeth, actually isn't bad; nor is the other celebrity cameo, by the model Claudia Schiffer, who plays the double-dealing girlfriend of a basketball star. All the same, Schiffer and Tyson's cosy coffee-shop chat about anthropology affords one of the more bizarre scenes of the screen year.

The movie looks ragged at times, and some parts feel underdeveloped, yet Toback is so committed to hustling along the action that it's impossible to be bored. He loves actors, and gets good performances not just from the star turns, but from the pros, too - Ben Stiller as a neurotic police detective invests the part with terrific concentration.

For some reason Toback hasn't bothered to put an ending on his film, leaving various narrative strands (a murder investigation, for example) openly unresolved; he simply splits the screen up as the credits roll, and lets us peek at what's happening six months on from the story that's been shown. It's almost as if he recognised the difficulty of tying off a loose multi-character story about race and instead left it to us, saying: Go on - you finish it.

The week's other ensemble movie, Duets, is a much blander affair, though there are suggestions it began as something more ambitious. Imagine Robert Altman's Short Cuts or Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia condensed into a road movie about karaoke singers. If that sounds unpromising, be assured that it's not as terrible as it might have been. A long-cherished project of director Bruce Paltrow, it's presumably the presence of his daughter Gwyneth that got it off the ground. She plays Vegas showgirl Liv, an impossibly sweet and ingenuous soul in need of parenting; preparing to bury her mother, she meets the father who skipped out on them years back. He is played by Huey Lewis (yes, him, the Eighties pop star) as a guy earning a living as a "karaoke hustler", which somehow lacks the seedy glamour of the more traditional pool kind. When Paul Newman got rumbled in The Hustler they broke his hands, but what punishment do they mete out to a karaoke hustler? Stuff socks down his throat?

The film pursues two other relationships born out of adversity. Todd (Paul Giamatti), a suburban drone fed up with the falseness of corporate America, decides to cut loose and go on the road, where he picks up escaped con Reggie (Andre Braugher). While Billy, (Scott Speedman, who has the look of a young Kurt Russell) is a cab driver fleeing the misery of a cheating girlfriend when he runs into a sparky singer and part-tim hooker, Suzi (Maria Bello), and lets her talk him into driving her to California. All of them will eventually converge at a hotel in Omaha, Nebraska, where there's a $5,000 purse to be won at a big-deal karaoke contest.

Paltrow and his screenwriter John Byrum want to convey the idea of lost souls searching for a connection, an emotional rescue from the drudgery and estrangement of their lives. Yet while there's evidence of effort, there's none of the urgency or acidulous wit an Altman would bring to the writing. Todd, the harassed exec who's seen one too many faceless hotel rooms, has to keep reminding us about the sorry business of The Way We Live Now: "I'm just a little tired of the American dream," he says, but we're just a little tired of the way he won't quit moaning about it. Everything feels overdone and shrill; the characters talk about themselves and each other as if they've spent the last 10 years studying made-for-TV movies. It also feels unbalanced; one minute we're contemplating the aftermath of a shooting, the next we're meant to get worked up about someone else's stage fright.

As for the karaoke, it's both a strength and a weakness. For some reason it's always a thrilling moment in a movie when a character, who has hitherto seemed incapable of poetic feeling, steps up to a microphone and sings with an unaffected soulfulness. The gift of a good voice suddenly enriches them, lends an unsuspected depth (Think of Jack Black surprising us with "Let's Get It On" at the end of High Fidelity). Here, Andre Braugher and Paul Giamatti give a particularly fine rendering of "Try A Little Tenderness", while Gwyneth and Huey make the most of the Smokey Robinson tune "Cruisin'". Good fun, but it feels utterly contrived. However touching their moments in the spotlight may be, the music never fits structurally or metaphorically into the story. Perhaps if one or even two of the cast went in for karaoke it might play naturally - but five of them is pushing it. Duets isn't a disaster, just trite and too desperate to please. Like karaoke itself, we've heard most of this stuff done more persuasively before.