(Credit: Alamy)
Thanks to Quentin Tarantino and Pulp Fiction, John Travolta was back on top of the world in the mid-1990s, with the second act of his career springing into life and re-establishing him as one of the biggest movie stars in the business.
Of course, he’d travelled down this road once before when Saturday Night Live and Grease catapulted him to household name status, but the lean years soon followed. However, once he threw on that wig, grew that goatee, and earned an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actor’ after playing Vincent Vega, he was one of the hottest commodities in Hollywood.
Between October 1995 and June 1997, Travolta appeared in five movies that sailed past $100million at the box office, and he was the top-billed name in all of them. Crime caper Get Shorty, fantasy comedy Michael, supernatural romantic drama Phenomenon, and John Woo blockbusters Broken Arrow and Face/Off was a hell of a run, which left one of the few duds from that period to slip through.
Written and directed by Desmond Nakano, White Man’s Burden flopped in cinemas and was shredded by critics, but because it was a relatively small picture compared to those aforementioned successes, it didn’t derail Travolta’s comeback. He’s adamant that the film was ahead of its time, but even on a superficial level, it’s easy to see why it was construed as tone-deaf then and even more so now.
The story opens with Harry Belafonte’s wealthy company man explaining at a glitzy dinner with his rich associates that white people are genetically inferior because most of them grow up without fathers. That’s because, in the world of White Man’s Burden, affluent African-American citizens live in gated communities, while the Caucasian demographic struggles with poverty in inner-city ghettos.
Does Travolta’s Louis Pinnock struggle to find employment after losing his job due to his lack of qualifications and education? Yep. Does he kidnap Belafonte’s character and drive him through the ghetto to try and teach him a lesson about social injustices, only to be told unsympathetically that it’s his fault and not society’s that he has to live this way? Also yes.
Does Travolta meet his end after being gunned down by the police, who mistakenly assume that he’s armed and dangerous? Incredibly, he does. Yeesh. It might have seen itself as progressive in the mid-1990s, but the concept hasn’t exactly aged gracefully with the passage of time. If anything, it’s more questionable than ever, not that the star would agree.
“Completely. Absolutely,” he responded when Nick Allen asked if the movie was ahead of its time. “Now, of course, White Man’s Burden was a little harder to pull off because the budget was so small, and we were trying to make such a big statement. Maybe it was a little out of its timing.”
Audiences didn’t pay much heed in the 1990s, but despite Travolta’s insistence, the blowback would be even worse if White Man’s Burden were made in the exact same way and released today, largely because it’s about as allegorically subtle and thematically heavy-handed as a sledgehammer directly to the face.
Related Topics
This post was originally published on here
