As much as this movie floundered at times I still liked it. There were points I was thinking, "This is absurd," yet they pulled it off. What started off to be something of a daft comedy full of despicable racial stereotypes was all just a set up for a grand ending.
Mark Watson (C. Thomas Howell) is a rich white L.A. kid living a shallow life, but he does get accepted to Harvard Law, which is no small task. It's at this time that his father (James B. Sikking) takes the advice of a less than stable psychiatrist and cut his son off financially.
Mr. Watson: "Son I want to give you your manhood."
Mark: "What would that mean in practical terms?"
Mr. Watson: "Well, it means I want you to go to Harvard, I want you to work hard-- very very hard. I also want you to feel good about yourself. You wanna feel good about yourself don't you son?"
Mark: "Sure Dad."
Mr. Watson: "Ha ha ha. That's why I've decided to let you pay your own way."
Mark: (stunned beyond belief) "Dad. That's... that's a sweet gesture, but it's really not necessary."
Mr. Watson: "Oh I think it is."
Mark: "What are you saying dad?"
Mr. Watson: "I'm saying that I took the money in your tuition account and used it to buy timeshare in a condo in Barbados."
And there you have it. Confident, excited Mark was turned into desperate Mark. In his desperation he hatched a hair-brained scheme. He would make himself up to look Black in order to get the Henry Q. Bouchard scholarship which is reserved for qualified Black applicants. What could go wrong? As Mark put it,
"It's gonna be great! These are the 80's man, it's the Cosby decade. America loves Black people."
Oh, how wrong he was.
For me, this movie was the cinematic representation of the book "Black Like Me." In 1959 John Howard Griffin took some pills to darken his skin in order to experience what it was like to be Black. He wrote an incredible book about the experience. Soul Man is a more humorous version of that same experiment.
Mark slowly learned that everyone didn't love Black people and that this plot of his would be much tougher than he imagined. And that was the most pleasing part of the movie. Seeing a privileged white kid come around to understand--even if only an inkling--what it's like to be Black.
