When it comes to the depiction of homelessness, Hollywood has taken a benign, almost mythical view of one of America's most disturbing problems. Glossing over the issue, the few movies that broach the subject have presented a stereotypically sanitized portrait, turning the homeless into noble saints or misunderstood geniuses.
The latest example is Kasi Lemmons' "The Caveman's Valentine," in which Samuel L. Jackson plays Romulus Ledbetter, a down-on-his-luck, Juilliard-trained composer and pianist. An outcast living in a nether world on the edge of Manhattan, the delusional Romulus believes his life is controlled by a powerful adversary he calls Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant. He engages in a dialogue with this impersonal force that emanates from atop the Chrysler Building and represents all the vices of the American way of life.
For the Record
Los Angeles Times Monday March 19, 2001 Home Edition Calendar Part F Page 2 Entertainment Desk 1 inches; 27 words Type of Material: Correction
Film title--The 1993 film in which Matt Dillon played a homeless man was "The Saint of Fort Washington." The title was reported incorrectly in an article and photo caption in Friday's Calendar.
In the film's cliched treatment, Romulus is a man trapped between genius and madness. He emerges from his "periodic insanity" to track down the killer of a young model, whose frozen corpse he discovers on a tree outside his cave-like dwelling.
But who would believe the rantings of a paranoid schizophrenic? Certainly not his daughter, who just happens to be a police officer, still bruised by her parents' separation.
And certainly not his new privileged friends of Manhattan's chic art world, who adopt him. Aiming to be a Gothic thriller with spiritual overtones, "Caveman" is undermined by George Dawes Green's pretentious script. Defying credibility, the narrative resorts to a routine Hollywood thriller in which a saintly madman stands alone against the universe--and triumphs, hence redeeming himself.
In that respect, "Caveman's Valentine" follows in the tradition of most Hollywood movies about the homeless. It's no coincidence that many of these films were made in the early 1990s, following the rapaciously corrupt 1980s. Their narratives often bring the jaded rich and famous to the brink of destruction by confronting them with homeless people, forcing them to do penance for their cynicism.
As original and fanciful as Terry Gilliam ("Brazil") is as a filmmaker, he too fell victim to cliches in "The Fisher King" (1991), another mythical tale of redemption by Richard LaGravenese. Early on, a TV executive pitches a weekly comedy series about the homeless that will show them as "wacky and wise."
