Street Smart Movie Review
To be a great actor, you have to be able to project real emotion any which way you can. Morgan Freeman is a great actor. Kathy Baker is a great actor. After a dozen movies in ten years, the empirical evidence that Christopher Reeve, then turning 35, was not a great actor was too compelling to be ignored. The same year that Robert Townsend was lampooning how black actors were invariably cast as pimps in Hollywood Shuffle, Morgan Freeman played the ultimate pimp in Street Smart. Like Bette Davis in 1935's Dangerous, Freeman defied you to ignore the alchemy in a no-holds-barred performance and made a stock part real. Baker took another favorite Hollywood stock part, that of a hooker, and turned it inside out. No matter what else was onscreen, Baker forced you to see what she saw, hear what she heard, feel what she felt. Needless to say, there were kudos galore for Freeman and Baker, and Street Smart is well worth watching for them alone, but Street Smart is not much of a movie. The story revolves around a fake scoop that ignites an authentic investigation. Reeve was unable to transform his essentially rigid role as a dishonest reporter, and the plot goes into slow motion whenever Freeman or Baker are offscreen. (The same thing occurred in 1995's Above Suspicion when Reeve was cast in an actor's dream role, brilliantly scripted by Jerry Lazarus, W.H. Macy, and director Steven Schachter. It's an eerily premonitory picture in light of actual events in Reeve's life, but he can't breathe life into his character as fellow cast members Joe Mantegna and William H. Macy can with their parts. Reeve's acclaimed debut as director of 1997's In the Gloaming suggests a career shift that might have been inevitable, anyway.)
1987 (R) 97m/C Christopher Reeve, Morgan Freeman, Kathy Baker, Mimi Rogers, Andre Gregory, Jay Patterson, Anna Maria Horsford; D: Jerry Schatzberg; W: David Freeman; C: Adam Holender; M: Miles Davis. Independent Spirit Awards ‘88: Best Supporting Actor (Freeman); Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards ‘87: Best Supporting Actor (Freeman); New York Film Critics Awards ‘87: Best Supporting Actor (Freeman); National Society of Film Critics Awards ‘87: Best Supporting Actor (Freeman), Best Supporting Actress (Baker); Nominations: Academy Awards ‘87: Best Supporting Actor (Freeman). VHS, LV, Closed Caption