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Features
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Between a Rock and a Hollywood Place
Wait till you hear the high-concept premise that Chris Rock turned down as an actor in order to make I Think I Love My Wife. It’s Pootie Tang, squared.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007 at 5:00 PM
By Brent Simon
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Dreamworks
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Budget: $40 million / Box Office: $38.7 million
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America has spoken, and to Chris Rock, it says without any need for a pejorative verb such as think: we know we like you better as a comedian. After two weekends, Rock’s sophomore directorial outing I Think I Love My Wife is limping away from theaters with just over $10 million in the till, a 65% decrease from what his more slapstick-friendly Head of State had managed at the same point back in 2003.
This despite some salacious pre-opening TMZ.com-sourced New York Daily News reports that Rock’s ten-year marriage to Malaak Compton was on the rocks (pun intended), and that perhaps even the alleged problems were related to a real-life onset romance between the actor-writer-director-producer and his co-star, Kerry Washington. The comedian quickly denied those allegations on Oprah.
But how does one break the news to their mate that they’re ‘artistically exploring’ infidelity and-or desertion - or, in the extreme case of rapper Eminem and his hit single “Stan,” outright homicide - in proactive, creative form? It’s not a new quandary, certainly, and Trust the Man writer-director Bart Freundlich no doubt had to broach similar awkward territory with his longtime companion and the mother of his children, Julianne Moore, when he penned World Traveler, about a young husband and father who walks out on his family without explanation.
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Fox Searchlight
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Budget: $10 million / Box Office: $10.7 million
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In person, during recent interviews to promote I Think I Love My Wife, the 42-year-old native of Andrews, South Carolina dismisses the Daily News hearsay, albeit in shrugging fashion. “Malaak likes the movie, she likes it a lot,” Rock tells FilmStew. “We’re fine.”
To Rock, such rumors are just part of the business, and something to be tolerated, if not accepted. “As a comedian, I can’t think about everything I say,” he insists. “I’m out of the concern business. I just do what I do. I’m not Picasso, but I’m sure he didn’t worry about getting the floor dirty, [going] ‘I need a drop-cloth!’” Here, Rock pauses. “You can’t be both happy that fire cooks your food and mad it burns your fingertips,” he explains.
Copping its big beats, improbably enough, from French auteur Eric Rohmer’s 1972 film Chloe in the Afternoon, and spinning off from there into a suburban-New York postcard sensibility nipped from the early offerings of Woody Allen, I Think I Love My Wife is a dramedy of swallowed temptation which centers around investment banker Richard Cooper (Rock). Richard has a good job at Pupkin & Langford (a wink to Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy), a wife (Gina Torres) he loves, and two young children. Outwardly, he leads a charmed life. On the inside, though, Richard is bored and worn down by routine, as well as frustrated by the lack of sex in his marriage.
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Michael Caufield/WireImage.com
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Hosting the 2006 Academy Awards
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Temptation in the flesh arrives in the form of Nikki (Kerry Washington), the super-hot ex-flame of an old friend. For the longest time, no infidelity occurs, but Richard - still acting like he’s having an affair - begins to feel the increasingly draining effects of this liaison on his other relationships, both at home and on the job.
“I’m never going to get paid a lot of money to make a movie like this,” Rock insists prophetically. “Most movies are so high-concept; studios want big, stupid ideas. Like, they wanted me to do this movie where a NASCAR driver is hurt, he dies, and they’re trying to pick out who’s going to drive this car that’s so expensive, and they cut on a TV and see this black guy being chased by police, and they’re like, ‘He’ll race our car!’ That’s a real concept. I got offered lots of money to do that, and I elected to do this, because this is what I’m more interested in.”
Sporting a thin, black, cashmere sweater pulled over a dress shirt, Rock is every bit the picture of buttoned-up domesticity that he chafes against in the movie. He’s wide-eyed, alert and talkative, but his answers are delivered while glancing off at points beyond the questioner. Each response is also full of pauses and staccato laughter, distancing signifiers that are characteristic of his modest print interviews, but traits that are stuffed back into the closet when he’s in his performer’s comfort zone, as evidenced by recent bits on Saturday Night Live and a Wednesday night appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
“I just wanted to play an adult,” Rock explains. “I said, ‘I want to be a man, I want to have man problems in a movie.’ I wanted to be grown already, because most comedies are about guys that won’t grow up. And in a weird way, this movie is like a grown person’s horror flick.”
Writing I Think I Love My Wife with frequent collaborator Louis C.K. (Pootie Tang), and delving into its grey areas of adult responsibility and at-odds inclinations, helped give Rock the confidence that he could direct the film as well. It’s something he says he wasn’t sure he wanted to do after his first experience behind the camera, Head of State, was so poorly received.
“I had to learn how to make a movie,” he says. “And I’m still learning, but I think I’m getting better at it. Part of learning is just trying to make the biggest possible movie every time, and sometimes the bigger movie is the smaller movie, do you know what I mean?”
| “In my career, the smaller thing tends to work out better for me,” he continues. “Like, oh, I’m on Saturday Night Live and that was good, but a little show on HBO was better. The same thing with my stand-up stuff. Head of State was a big, $40 million movie, and Think only cost $10 million.” |
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