African
Americans are accustomed to being screwed by the power structure
in American society. In Changing Lanes, insurance
salesmarketer Doyle Gipson (played by Samuel L. Jackson),
a recovering alcoholic, is driving on the FDR Expressway to
a child custody hearing when Wall Street attorney Gavin Banek
(played by Ben Affleck) totals his car. Rather than exchanging
insurance information, as Gipson would prefer, Banek gives
him a blank check and drives off, but leaving behind a valuable
document that Banek needs to produce in court that same day.
Denied a ride by Banek, Gipson walks off the freeway, with
the document in his pocket, and arrives late for the custody
hearing. The judge rules that Gipson must surrender full custody
of his two pre-teen boys to his former wife. Although Gipson
objects that he has arranged payment for a house in Queens
as a gift to his wife and children so that they can stay near
their father instead of moving to Portland, as his wife proposes,
the white judge gavels him down because he arrived late to
the hearing. Meanwhile, Banek appears in court without the
document, and a black judge orders him to produce the document
before the end of the day. In a panic to recover the document,
Banek pays a computer hacker to track down Gipson rather than
making a polite phonecall. After the hacker arranges to bankrupt
Gipson, Banek calls him at work to leave a nasty message,
promising to return his credit in exchange for the document.
Meanwhile, Banek's conscience starts to bother him, as he
realizes that the document that he seeks was improperly extracting
money from a dying millionaire, so he could go to jail for
perpetrating a fraud upon the court. Next, Banek discovers
that the senior partners in his law firm, also implicated
in the fraud, stand to gain millions, and one partner even
arranges to forge the original document so that Banek will
not need to contact Gipson. Yet, Banek inexplicably continues
to seek the original document, not appreciating that his partners
will proceed with the forgery anyway. Gipson, who discards
the document after the hearing, unaccountably does not cash
the blank check and retrieves the document so that he can
"do the right thing." Next, Banek starts a rumor
that Gipson is going to school to kidnap his sons and then
arranges a call to Gipson that falsely implies that his sons
have been injured; when Gipson shows up to check on his sons,
manifesting excitement, police place him under arrest. His
wife quickly learns where he is, visits him in jail, and vows
to move to Portland for sure. Gipson's AA sponsor (played
by William Hurt) then somehow finds that he is in jail, bails
him out, and bawls him out without hearing Gipson's side of
the story. Gipson then locates Banek's car, unscrews the nuts
holding one of the wheels, and Banek crashes near the same
site as the earlier accident. Finally, Gipson brings the document
to Banek in his Wall Street office, no strings attached, and
tells the story of his life. Doubtless prodded by Hollywood
executives, director Roger Michell then shifts gears after
providing a classic example of how rich whites run over poor
blacks without batting an eyelash and instead has Banek decide
not only to blackmail his boss (played by Sydney Pollock)
with the original document but also to persuade Gipson's wife
to stay in New York to live in the house to be bought by newly
creditworthy Gipson, who presumably could have earlier reestablished
his credit and bought the house anyway with Banek's blank
check. The insane plot, in which a white man supposedly obtains
some kind of eleventh hour redemption from the honesty of
a frustrated black man, also has a scene in which Gipson gratuitously
tells two white bar patrons about how African Americans have
been treated miserably in American society, whereupon the
bartender tells Gipson to leave, the two taunt Gipson outside
the bar, and he preemptively knocks them down. Thus, a white
man saves a black family after wrestling with his conscience
during the day and deciding in the end to make a Faustian
pact as a Wall Street shyster who, in the words of his boss,
will do "more good than harm." Happy ending? This
reviewer would favor changing plots. MH
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