Film Review: Luce Shines A New Light On Racism In America
Luce is one of the best thrillers I have ever seen, in part, because its thrills are based on humanity. People move this world according to their actions and reactions towards each other, and, for Luce, the titular character, this is a gift and a burden. Charming, intelligent, and traumatized: Luce is a young black man with a “future,” of which the fragility, of this seemingly rare privilege, turns him into a master manipulator with a valid cause.
When you are a person of color, especially a human being with a lot ambition and talent like Luce, you cannot make mistakes. Your own race and ethnicity is treated like a threat to your dreams and talents because they are socially stereotyped as “less” and “criminal.” Enter Octavia Spencer as Harriet Wilson; a stern history teacher that can be selective in which students she esteems and punishes. While Luce, in the beginning, is a favorite, seeing one of his friends lose a scholarship because he smoked weed, fractures him. Within a week, years of work leaves the other man back on the “wrong side of the tracks,” where Luce, himself, came from but in another country, Eritrea. Adopted by Naomi Watts’ Amy Edgar and Tim Roth’s Peter, the teen feels pressured to be a golden child; the young, black boy taken from a war-torn country and raised by two good, wealthy white people to become a great American. He is supposed to be a symbol that privilege and blackness can live together in America but, to him, he is just a human being ….. quietly losing it.
Luce Trailer #1 (2019) | Movieclips Trailers
Spencer’s Harriet and Kelvin Harrison Jr.’s Luce are the heartbeat of this film, in part, because Luce is about race relations. Watts, as usual, is amazing and breaks your heart as a mother who loves her child, but struggles to understand his life and felt burdens as a black man. He has a pressure to be perfect and to relieve that pressure he becomes, in some ways, villainous. Harrison Jr is too good as Luce. He consistently cracks a massive smile that might as well carry ill intent, intelligence, and charisma in every tooth. When he and Octavia Spencer are on screen, the movie is brilliant because you have two fiercely smart, bold black persons trying to teach other what “blackness in America” means, and they do not like each others’ definition. The result is a strange, “cat and mouse” plot that intriguingly plays out in a school.
We first learn about race and racial dynamics in school. Thus, Luce being set in high-school, where the prospects of higher education feel like a prospect to a higher life, is perfect. As he sees his fellow black men get shut out, while he remains a poster child for diversity, he grows insane. Written by J.C. Lee and directed by Julius Onah, Luce is riveting, perfectly paced, and poetic in its nuanced conversations on what it means to be “of color” in 2019. It truly can be maddening, and Luce is the story of a genius, young man smart enough to cover his madness. See Luce, In Theaters, on August 2.
