When McMillan's Waiting to Exhale dominated the best-seller lists (on its way to an inevitable hit-movie reincarnation) several years ago, it presaged a seismic cultural shift that had been a long time coming. The black middle class had finally arrived in the mainstream. In need of a voice to supplement Oprah's, it found one in McMillan. Her strength is her ability to confect a fictional universe not only removed from the purview of white racism, but also one removed from the far subtler oppression of black identity.
McMillan's novels are about women with "man trouble." This universal theme has not unexpectedly attracted no small number of white readers as well. But to her core audience of black females, such tales offer the ineffable luxury of problems whose solutions never cut so deeply as to draw the sort of blood (their own) that African-Americans have long wearied of having to mop up. If this bespeaks of a certain superficiality, then the McMillan faithful will surely say so much the better. McMillan herself has a younger man in her life. But that's not why her book How Stella Got Her Groove Back has been read so voraciously. What McMillanites want is to get their own groove back through fantasy. And fantasy is what movies, like no other known form of cultural expression, are ideal for providing.
Whoopi Goldberg's performance in Stella provides a perfect example of McMillan's allure in action. Like John Travolta, Goldberg is an omnipresent fixture in the Hollywood firmament. But she's paid a price for such visibility. Simply put, Whoopi hasn't appeared alongside this many black people in a movie since The Color Purple (1985). Her wisecracking Eve Arden-style best friend role here is scarcely fresh, yet it allows her to exhibit more genuine acting skill than she has since The Player (1992). In other words, she doesn't push any gesture or line reading in her usual ever-so-slightly-overdone manner, the better to differentiate herself from white costars; she declines to ostentatiously "get down" in word and deed and avoids conforming to the received "wisdom" of African-American "realness." Whoopi's just there, every bit as much as Angela Bassett is there, and both she and her fans are the better for it.
Bassett breathes a lot easier here than in her recent turns as Tina Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It (1993) and an enraged, wronged wife in Waiting to Exhale (1995). She's every inch as glamorous as Whitney Houston (The Bodyguard) or Diana Ross (Mahogany), yet Bassett never descends to being a demonstration model for fantasies so removed from ordinary experience as to approach science fiction. And part of that has to do with the way her part is written. A pivotal moment comes fairly early on in Stella, when, having just met the object of her affection, Bassett asks if he's a rapper. He, needless to say, isn't. But the kick comes in the question itself, for the implication is clear that if he were, she wouldn't have anything to do with him. We've come a long way from "the 'hood" and its overwhelmingly narcissistic displays of black "maleness" advanced as the be-all, end-all of African-American consciousness. At the same time, we're somewhat off to the side of the (relatively) everyday world of last year's surprising hit Soul Food and the rural exotica of the even more surprising hit Eve's Bayou, also from 1997. Stella centers on nothing more than the pleasant daydream of any number of women in their thirties and forties -- both black and white.
It's familiar territory, trod most memorably 43 years ago in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows. "But Carrie -- he's your gardener!" a shocked Agnes Moorehead (playing the Whoopi role) told a troubled Jane Wyman (the Bassett part) on hearing of her attraction for the young and studly Rock Hudson (the Taye Diggs slot). But times have changed -- along with the stars' complexions. This time out the family accepts the stud without putting up much of a fuss. And why shouldn't they? And why shouldn't you? It's just a movie. And for African-Americans, the ability to say that simple phrase is reason enough to rejoice.
How Stella Got Her Groove Back.
Directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan. Written by Ron Bass and Terry McMillan. Starring Angela Bassett, Whoopi Goldberg, and Taye Diggs.
