I hadn't seen John Landis' 1988 movie since the 1990s, when I watched it two or three more times after I originally saw it in the theater. I started keeping track of rewatches in 2005, so it's possible I watched it in the first half of that decade, but unlikely. It had been awhile.
I always felt my affection for this movie was something of a surprise, like the movie should have been bad but somehow ended up being good. I guess Eddie Murphy was already making misfires by the late 1980s, though Harlem Nights (which I still haven't seen) was not until the following year, so it wouldn't have been biasing me if I'd come into America with low expectations. Maybe the chronology of events was that I didn't think Coming to America was anything special on my first viewing, but subsequently came to really embrace it. I can't remember at this point and it really doesn't matter.
What does matter was how right I was in my eventual assessment of the film.
Coming to America holds up like a lot of movies from 1988 surely don't. On a purely technical level, there may still be no finer example of makeup work in the history of cinema than the one by Rick Baker here, to allow Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall to disappear into the roles of secondary characters in a way that completes what they started with their accent work. There may be equally fine examples, but none finer.
But I'm not referring to the look of Coming to America when I say that it holds up. (Because, let's face it, there's no way for 1980s fashion to really hold up.) It's the feel. And that feel is sooo gooood.
When the credits rolled, I shouted out "So much heart!" My wife agreed, but not as enthusiastically as I'd hoped. Which is okay, because not everyone can be enthusiastic enough to shout out their compliments at the end of a movie.
The balance this movie gets so right is between the delightful naivete of Prince Akeem (Murphy) and the rough edges of the world around him. There are plenty of venal characters in this movie and people who are just plain jerks, but the nifty trick of David Sheffield and Barry W. Blaustein's script is that the characters dropping f-bombs and acting in their own self interest do not diminish the film's core heart in the slightest. In fact, they serve as reminders of the essential purity of Akeem and the way you have to use optimism and a good nature to overcome the ways the world tries to swallow you. It's an essential proving ground for Akeem as he tries to convince himself he would make a good king.
We had for a time considered showing our kids Coming to America, maybe thinking they could watching Coming 2 America with us, but I told my wife (who suggested the idea) that there was some content in this movie that was not appropriate for them. The thing I remembered most was the scene of the bare-breasted members of Akeem's court washing him in his royal bath and telling him "The royal penis is clean." But for a moment I convinced myself that this mention of his royal penis was about as bad as it gets in terms of language.
Uh uh. There are characters dropping profanities left and right in this film, consistent with a pre-Giuliani and pre-Disney version of New York whose subways were still overrun with graffiti and whose streets still had a variety of tough characters walking them. Akeem may be naive but the film isn't, and I love that about it. I seriously doubt Coming 2 America has been made with the same liberal use of language -- today, unfortunately, we're a lot more likely to put a family friendly character like Akeem in a family friendly movie. But I hope the sequel holds on to some of the laugh-out-loud gruffness of the original. I did laugh out loud plenty of times, and pretty much any time Akeem's landlord, played by Frankie Faison, opens his mouth. "Yeah, you'll love my apartment," he says upon preparing to trade with Akeem and Semmi. "It's a real shithole."
My wife thought that John Amos' character, Cleo McDowell, was portrayed as too interested in enriching himself at the expense of his daughter's happiness. But I feel like this is another area where the film is honest while still retaining its heart. He's involved in a shady business practice to essentially steal every one of the ideas and working practices of McDonald's, to confuse people into thinking he's running an actual McDonald's, so you know he's got a bottom line profit mentality. The thing is, this is an actual thing in New York, where I saw businesses in the Bronx called Kennedy Fried Chicken and Kansas Fried Chicken, both of which were designed to trick customers into thinking they were eating at a national restaurant chain.
Besides, McDowell gives up his chance at a million dollars -- then at two million -- when the Zamunda king (James Earl Jones) offers to buy his daughter out of Prince Akeem's life. That may be a bit of an exaggeration in the opposite direction, but it firmly convinces us that this is a good man at heart. Maybe my wife is right that they'd hedge their bets on McDowell more from the start in a movie made today, but if true that may be something to mourn rather than celebrate. I think the portrayal of his character in Coming to America is just right.
What may be even better about the movie than its heart is in the way it breaks ground as a trailblazer for representation. This is another thing I wouldn't have thought to credit Coming to America with until I saw it again.
Simply put, this is a movie starring almost exclusively Black people. Without Eddie Murphy as the star, it surely would never have crossed over to a mainstream audience, but it mightn't have crossed over even with him as the star, so it represented a real risk for Paramount at the time. (And in a side note, I noticed that the camera travels three-dimensionally through the Paramount logo at the start of the film and into the rolling terrain of Zamunda -- I didn't think they'd started doing that trick until more recently.)
The risk may not have been making the movie at all, since it's a winning idea, but making it the way they made it. A skittish studio worried about its bottom line would have, in most scenarios, found a way to include more white characters. I'm not sure how you do that while keeping the same general contours of this story -- interracial romance would have been a far greater risk at the time -- but they would have tried.
Instead, the white characters here are total tokens. The largest white role is played by comedian Louie Anderson as a clerk at McDowell's, and he has no more than seven or eight lines in total. Then there are some really funny cameos by white performers -- like the woman at the Western Union who reads Semmi's telegram to King Jaffe Joffer with that priceless New York accent dripping with sarcasm -- but really, not much else in terms of white skin on screen at all. My wife read that Paramount had actually forced them to add Anderson into the cast, so there could be at least one white character who appears in the whole movie, but that's hardly something to get up in arms about considering how little he actually does.
This is basically a straightforward fish-out-of-water romantic comedy with just the races reversed. Instead of a token Black best friend, there's a token white cash register operator at a McDowell's restaurant. In fact, the token white character has considerably less to do than a token Black character would have, maybe even back then, though Black tokenism was pretty awful and paltry right at the start.
In fact, I'm thinking of another favorite romantic comedy I've recently revisited from the 1980s with a very similar plot, which is Splash. In both films a fish-out-of-water (literal in that case) character comes to New York in search of a romantic partner, though Madison has already identified hers in Splash. Both main characters are inordinately trusting, good-natured and innocent, and threaten to have those traits squashed by what New York does to them. (Though the New York in Splash is a considerably more optimistic place; it's the scientific community that is the villain there.) Both characters also have to initially deceive their love interests.
The big difference between the two? Splash is a slam dunk from a studio's perspective, filled with character types who historically reward financial investment. Coming to America had to make Paramount at least a little bit squeamish -- what if white audiences just don't want to see it? -- but they went ahead anyway with very little in the way of support from white characters. Even with Murphy as a proven box office draw, this was the first time he was appearing in a film with almost exclusively Black characters. In fact, he'd been pretty much the only Black character in films like Beverly Hills Cop and The Golden Child.
Somehow, Landis et al had their finger on the pulse of a world 33 years in the future when they made Coming to America. That's not to say everything reads perfectly, but even the moments I thought might reveal their era-appropriate ignorance did not. In playing devil's advocate and mentioning some scenes that she thought did not work so well, my wife mentioned the "bad dating candidate" montage when Akeem and Semmi are at a bar, hoping to find Akeem's future queen. I was waiting for the moment when Hall appeared in drag, thinking that it would be a blatantly transphobic moment in a way that was extremely common back then. I was glad to see that the character is not definitively coded as trans, or as being a man in drag. Hall plays the character, but the character could just as easily be a very large woman who threatens to be too much for Akeem as she says she'd "tear him apart."
I could probably go on, but I'll save some of my thoughts as a point of contrast for when I watch and inevitably write about Coming 2 America.
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