January 3, 1992 | Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Two years ago this month, Wendell B. Harris Jr. copped the top prize at the Sundance Film Festival with his audacious and often outrageous Chameleon Street, a fact-based comedy-drama about a Michigan con artist with an amazing ability to repeatedly re-invent himself. Shortly after Harris accepted his award, someone asked Steven Soderbergh, whose sex, lies & videotape had won the top Sundance prize a year earlier, what he thought of Harris’ victory.
Soderbergh, a member of the 1990 jury that picked Chameleon Street for first-place honors, smiled and replied: “I feel great! I want to see it happen to someone else now!”
Trouble is, it didn’t.
Chameleon Street has turned out to be the Cinderella movie that nobody took to the ball. It has been released in only a handful of cities, usually for limited runs, and has been generally ignored by the national press. Several weeks ago, it had its Houston premiere, sort of — it was a midnight show at the River Oaks 3 Theatre. When it opens tonight for a three-night stand at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Chameleon Street will receive its first (and, in all likelihood, last) prime-time theatrical exposure in this market.
What happened? Why didn’t this nervy, generally well-reviewed little movie land a major distributor, and get major distribution?
It’s tempting, and not altogether inaccurate, to say it’s all because Wendell Harris is a black filmmaker, and Chameleon Street is a movie in which most of the characters — including the protagonist, William Douglas Street, played by Harris himself — are black. True, there have been a lot of black-oriented films to turn up at theaters and drive-ins this year — Boyz N the Hood and New Jack City are just two of the box-office success stories — but Chameleon Street is not a movie that can be pitched quite so easily. It isn’t about street gangs or drug dealers or maverick cops. It’s a movie with serious artistic ambitions. And its plot cannot be described in a simple, easily-exploitable tagline.
And, to be blunt about it, most distributors don’t have the foggiest idea how to sell a “black art film.” Consider what happened with To Sleep With Anger, a film that opened to glowing reviews and puny audiences, and you will understand the extent of the problem.
But there are other things that have nothing to do with race that might account for the unfortunate fate of Chameleon Street. Harris has structured his story in a challenging, stream-of-conscious style that is emotionally affecting, and psychologically insightful, but not consistently gripping, and not always comprehensible. The movie abounds in gaping plot holes — we never learn, for example, how Street remains at large and so visible for so long after escaping from prison — and the filmmaking technique sometimes seems more slapdash than inspired.
Still, even its most serious flaws are overshadowed by its singular graces. And the very best thing about Chameleon Street, Harris’ mesmerizing performance as William Street, is good enough to compensate for any and all shortcomings.
During the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, William Street, an under-educated but sharply intelligent con artist, managed to pass himself off as, among other things, a lawyer, a Time magazine reporter, a French exchange student at Yale University (despite his inability to actually speak French), and, most stunningly, as a surgical resident at Wayne State Medical School (where he performed dozens of operations, including a hysterectomy that is presented in harrowing detail during Chameleon Street).
Harris has taken the raw facts of Street’s life story, and turned them into a provocative study of the pathological self-loathing that would make a man wish to constantly lose himself in new, more prestigious identities. A prison psychologist suggests that Street instinctively intuits what another person needs, and then becomes that need, in the hope of gaining acceptance. That’s true, as far as it goes, but there’s more to the impersonations than that: They serve as richly vivid metaphors for the struggle of black men to empower themselves in a white-dominated society.
Chameleon Street has some discomforting moments as it suggests that black women in general, and black wives in particular, are what goad black men to obtain money by any and all means necessary. But this, too, is part of the subjective point of view sustained throughout the film. Street feels humiliated by his inability to provide for (and, in one key scene, even protect) his wife. He feels frustrated by his inability to channel his nimble intelligence into bettering himself rather than creating new identities. And, perhaps most important, he is tripped up not merely by accidents — a security check here, a chance encounter there — but also by his own self-destructiveness.
Harris, an actor with screen presence to burn, gives us a powerful and thoroughly persuasive account of Street’s complexities. More’s the pity, then, that just as Street never really succeeded for very long in his manufactured identities, Chameleon Street has been unable to attract the wide mainstream audience that any film this promising so richly deserves.
