The Travolta/Cage Project #33 Amos & Andrew (1993)

One of the biggest challenges of the Travolta/Cage Project and Travolta/Cage, my years-long, multi-media deep dive into the complete filmographies of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta, involves writing about Cage and Travolta movies that I have already written about before. 

It’s not that much of a problem if I wrote about the movie early in my career. I oftentimes do not even remember watching movies that I reviewed during my early days at The A.V Club, let alone writing about them. So I don’t worry too much about repeating myself I I write up a movie in 2020 that I previously reviewed in 1998 or 2002 or 2006. 

I am a completely different person than I was back then. I’ve grown. I’ve matured. I’ve de-evolved. I’ve gone careening madly sideways. Half a lifetime separates the uncertain present from a review I wrote in 1998. 

It’s different with movies that I have reviewed fairly recently, however. Then I definitely worry about repeating myself and having nothing new to say. Thankfully my brain works in curious and unexpected ways some times. When I wrote about Convoy, the Sam Peckinpah movie based on the popular CB radio trucker song of the same name for my Forgotbusters column, for example, I was aggressively unimpressed. I saw it as a dispiriting nadir in its auteur’s spectacularly checkered career but when I re-watched it for my big Sam Peckinpah project I absolutely adored it. I now consider it the apex not just of Peckinpah’s career but cinema as a whole.

I love discovering that I now love movies I previously dismissed or disparaged like Small Soldiers, Zoolander, Mars Attacks or, to cite an extreme example, Nothing But Trouble. I’m less pleased when the reverse happens and I find myself losing whatever affection I had for a film upon a re-watch. 

That’s what happened with the deeply muddled 1993 inter-racial mismatched buddy comedy Amos & Andrew. If I remember correctly I originally intended for Amos & Andrew to be a movie I saw but did not write about. My life used to be full of movies like that but the demanding production schedule of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place dictates that I write about 98 percent of the movies I watch in order to not fall behind. 

As is often the case, I started watching Amos & Andrew for pleasure and found myself thinking, “Shit, I should probably write about this” about twenty minutes in. So I pitched it to Splitsider, where I was a columnist at the time and they published an article about a Nicolas Cage/Samuel L. Jackson vehicle I argued was surprisingly interesting and provocative considering how thoroughly it has been forgotten despite the iconic status of its beloved stars. 

I had a markedly different response this time around. Watching Amos & Andrew in 2020, I found it shockingly uninteresting and non-provocative despite a premise seemingly ripped from today’s headlines. 

What changed? I obviously changed, of course. With each passing month I grow more desperate and less employable. But the world, and particularly our country has changed as well. In the years since that Splitsider article the election of Donald Trump happened. #MeToo happened. Charlottesville happened. Perhaps most importantly, the culture-wide reckoning that followed in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police dramatically changed the way we see race and racism in our country and its relationship with law enforcement. 

These developments should lend Amos & Andrew an unmistakable timeliness, a devastating contemporary resonance. Instead they merely underline just how far the movie falls short of realizing its ambition to cross-pollinate Ace in the Hole with Bonfire of the Vanities. 

Samuel L. Jackson stars as the titular Andrew Sterling, a superstar intellectual, writer and Pulitzer Prize winner who has become rich and famous as the eloquent, sonorous voice of black rage. Sterling has reached household name status but when liberal lawyers Phil (Michael Lerner) and Judy (Margaret Colin), real Ken and Karen types, see the playwright operating stereo equipment while black in his newly purchased summer home in a ritzy white New England neighborhood they automatically assume that he is a dangerous criminal and call the police to report a burglary. 

When the cops descend upon Andrew’s home they set off the alarm for his car and when he walks outside to turn It off with his keychain he is met by a deluge of bullets by cops who think he’s packing heat. 

Inept, corrupt, ambitious and politically-minded Police Chief Cecil Tolliver (Dabney Coleman) realizes that he and his men have made a terrible, potentially ruinous mistake in opening fire on a famous black man for using a CD player and turning off his car alarm. 

Thinking only of his own reputation and political career, the Chief decides to fake a crime to cover up their blundering. The Chief agrees to spring small time criminal Amos Odell (Nicolas Cage) from jail if he’ll go into Andrew’s home with a shotgun and pretend to take him hostage. 

The idea is that Otis will then be arrested but then let free so that he can start a new life in Canada. The amiable scumbag has nothing to lose so he agrees to the shady deal and swaggers into Andrew’s house with a gun, only to quickly realize that the Captain has betrayed him by leaking his name and image to the press. 

Andrew assumes that Amos is an assassin dispatched by white America to murder him for the powerful truths he has exposed about its duplicity and lies. This is treated by the film as a manifestation of his narcissism even though Andrew is one hundred percent right about his life being in danger due to the murderous prejudices and fear-based incompetence of white people. 

On a similar note, the great Giancarlo Esposito is tragically wasted as Reverend Fenton Brun, an unmistakably Al Sharpton-like self-promoter who arrives at Sterling’s house with torch-wielding followers behind him to angrily protest the racist mistreatment of Andrew Sterling at the hands of police and a neighborhood that prides itself on being liberal and open minded but is actually deeply racist. 

The flashy reverend is depicted as a shameless self-promoter for whom this media circus is just another way to get his name in the papers and on the news but I couldn’t help but be struck by how fundamentally right the reverend is: Sterling’s life was threatened by racist cops and bigoted neighbors, just not in the exact way the writer and activist reverend initially think.

I vaguely recalled Amos & Andrew as being a provocative comedy about race and racism. I probably should have remembered, or at least assumed, that being a 1993 lowbrow comedy about race, Amos & Andrew would also be pretty racist as well in the way that it seems to cosign Amos’ bigotry. 

Amos calls Andrew the whitest black man that he knows. He tells him that he’s probably another one of those sell outs who rants and raves about the injustices of the white man, then marries a blonde white woman with big fake breasts and moves to a white neighborhood while continuing to make his living off hating white people. Though Andrew is understandably angry and insulted at first, we’re supposed to see it as a big sign of spiritual and emotional growth when Andrew tells Amos that he’s not entirely wrong in his racist assessment that a black man who enjoys a nice quality of life must have sold out his principles to join the cultural elites.

Cage does what he can with a perversely thankless role but there’s not much you can do with a character whose primary traits seem to be casual racism and an unfortunate sexual attraction to women hovering around the age of consent. That Amos is sympathetic at all is a tribute almost exclusively to Cage’s enormous likability as an actor and a performer.

Over the course of Amos & Andrew two very different men from very different worlds bond as they try to figure out a way to wiggle their way out of the predicament they find themselves in and defeat their common enemy in a murderously corrupt police department. 

Andrew is minding his own damned business when his life is repeatedly threatened by racist police yet Amos & Andrew somehow seems to think that he needs to change more than the character whose three defining characteristics are criminality, casual racism and a weakness for jailbait. 

Andrew needs to lighten up and take himself less seriously and not see everything through the prism of race but all Amos has to do is be a little more respectful and a little less overtly racist. 

Amos & Andrew is maddening because it has so much potential yet it squanders just about all of it. The film’s racial politics are all mixed up like pasta primavera. It doesn’t seem to know what to say so it ends up saying not much of anything at all. 

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