Within the constricting artifice of its setting and vision, the new movie "Lakeview Terrace," suggests a great deal about our contemporary culture, not all of it entirely pleasant. The picture works some unusual twists on a familiar situation, reversing some of the expectations and assumptions that characterize the temper of the nation in this moment. In a manner that combines the subtle and the brutal, it confronts some of the great divides of race and class that continue to trouble the American spirit.

Employing that tired notion about home ownership as the equivalent of something our politicians call the American Dream - have our souls shrunk to so small a size that our highest national fantasies and aspirations revolve around real estate? - the movie deals with the predicament of a young couple in their first house, a handsome place in a pleasant suburb of Los Angeles. Unfortunately, Chris Mattson (Patrick Wilson) and his wife Lisa (Kerry Washington) move next door to a police officer, Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson), who, for a number of reasons, immediately resents their presence.

A stern, puritanical widower, a martinet of a father to his two children, and not surprisingly something of a voyeur, Abel regards his new neighbors as spoiled intruders, emblems of the depraved culture he confronts and occasionally cooperates with in his job. When he spies on them making love in their swimming pool, he believes they will corrupt his children. The fact that the Mattsons are an interracial couple disturbs him even more, especially since, as he later reveals, his wife died in an automobile accident along with her white boss when she should have been working somewhere else.

Abel launches a campaign of harassment against the Mattsons, steadily escalating his approach from annoyance to vandalism to criminal conduct. He shines his bright security spotlights into their bedroom, disables their air conditioner, slashes the tires on their car - all actions that his neighbors cannot actually pin on him. He constantly mocks and taunts Chris, subtly humiliating him, bullying him into ultimatums that the smaller, slighter, younger man cannot back up, and exploiting his size, strength, and, naturally, his uniform, badge, and gun. 

While Abel's relentless hostility torments them, it also generates problems in the Mattsons' relationship, which begins to deteriorate from some internal pressures that the harassment reveals and intensifies. They argue about their own racial differences, Lisa's father's condescension toward Chris and his disapproval of their marriage, and Lisa's desire to bear a child. At the same time, throughout the film, one of those California wildfires burns in the background, endangering the Mattsons' house and neighborhood, and suggesting the smoldering tension lurking just beyond their precarious world, threatening to explode into violence and destruction.

"Lakeview Terrace" cleverly inverts the all-too-familiar story of a black family moving into a white suburb, showing the more sophisticated complexities of race in contemporary America. Abel directs his hostility only against the Mattsons, not against his other white or his Asian neighbors, with whom he apparently enjoys a relatively friendly association. His background, his personal history, his profession, and his complicated personality account for his attitude and his actions, which lead inevitably to a final complication that occurs completely outside the arena of race.

Patrick Wilson's characterization of Chris Mattson as a decent man, anxious to behave correctly, hesitant to alienate his neighbor, and powerless against the savvy and connections of a police officer who finally forces the issue into violence, echoes something of the plight and the solution of Dustin Hoffman in Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs." His weakness provides a foil for Sam Jackson's genuinely powerful performance, which not only demonstrates once again his versatility as an actor, but actually sustains an otherwise quite simple, predictable, but also most disturbing narrative. Without attempting either a safely liberal or a smugly conservative view of its subtext of race relations in this country, "Lakeview Terrace" provides some subtle, instructive, and timely insights into that continuing American dilemma, which, of course, in this election year, the nation confronts once again. 

Lakeview Terrace

(PG-13), directed by Neil LaBute

Now playing