MOVIE REVIEW: LAKEVIEW TERRACE

LAKEVIEW TERRACE
Five Cows



A mixed-race couple moves into a new home, and the neighbor is a bigoted cop. Sounds like the premise for another tedious, politically-correct treatise on white guilt, doesn’t it? Yeah, well, get this: the bigoted cop is black. Now there’s something you don’t see from Hollywood every day, a town so immersed in political correctness that its stereotypes have stereotypes.

I don’t even know what that means, but it’s true.

Billed as a thriller, Lakeview Terrace is more of a slow-burn than thrill ride. When Chris and Lisa Mattson, well-played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington, move into a home next door to a subtly-spooky cop you know what you’re in for – at least if you’ve seen the trailers for the film. What you may not expect is the attention paid to character development. This is both the film’s strength and weakness.

In the real world, hostilities turn tragic by degrees. There are dirty looks and subtle slights, followed by angry words and non-violent gesturing, and the guns and yard rakes generally don’t come out until the final chapter. That’s how I roll, anyhow. Hollywood, however, rarely has time for such laborious storytelling, fearing that if a body’s not be rolled off on a gurney in the first ten minutes the audience will fall asleep.

While the first half of the film might be considered slow by some, I was glad the time was taken to add depth to the personalities involved. The Mattson’s at first come off like a stereotypical yuppie couple, but true sympathy develops along with their characters. Wilson and Washington bring a recognizable humanity to their roles that rings authentic.

Samuel L. Jackson, on the other hand, is one scary dude, all evil-sly smiles and repressed hostility as Abel Turner, one of L.A.’s finest. I was thinking to myself that the only role in which I didn’t find Jackson scary was as “Clean” in Apocalypse Now, but when I looked it up it turns out that was Lawrence Fishburn. So I guess I’ve always been afraid of Samuel L. Jackson. If Walmart starts selling Jackson masks I’m locking my doors on Halloween.

Refreshingly, while this is no Disney after-school special, none of the language or violence is gratuitous. It’s just a surprisingly mature, thought-provoking thriller that an adult can watch without first enduring a lobotomy. I give Lakeview Terrace five cows with their frontal lobes still intact.