Watching Ray, over the course of 67 years, slowly lose his youthful ebullience and spark, become more stooped and defeated - his speech slowing, his eyes shedding their early demonic twinkle, until by the end, he seems a sadder, wiser remnant of his former chatterbox self - is a remarkable experience. And "Life" allows Murphy to do something different: to deepen the character and show how he alters with age. The younger Rayford is the Murphy we've known since his younger "Saturday Night Live" days: the whiplash-fast wiseacre whose mouth runs ahead of everybody - including, at times, himself. At his worst, he can be obnoxious, overplaying the tough dudes he lightly mocked in "The Nutty Professor." But, in many ways, this is a quintessential Eddie Murphy performance. (Ray doesn't even have a romantic interest.)Īt his best, Murphy is a comic dynamo whose energy levels and awareness charge up the screen. Why is Murphy almost always more effective in male-bonding movies than romances - unless, as in "Nutty Professor," he plays a character far from his usual persona? In any case, "Life" follows the pattern. The frame-up, with the guys arrested for the murder of the gambler (Clarence Williams III) who bilked Ray of their going-home cash, is scarily plausible, especially back then. In that section, rich enough for a whole movie scenario in itself, Murphy and Lawrence, working together with great slashing camaraderie, sharpen their comic chops on each other, getting into their Mississippi jam with the cheerful inevitability of Crosby and Hope in a "Road" movie - but with more disastrous consequences. Some of "Life's" best scenes are in its opening Harlem-to-Mississippi segment, with Ray and Claude sent on their booze run to settle their debts with gang lord Spanky (played by ex-funkster Rick James). And, even if it's stronger on the cliches than on the truths, "Life" has surprisingly potent moments - right on up through some very phony melodramatic contrivances in the later scenes that tend to drag the whole movie down. Demme - and writers Ramsey and Stone - keep shifting tones, mixing up movie cliches and the painful truths that lie behind them. Though presented comically, with Cassavetes as a genial boss and Brent Jennings as Hoppin' Bob, a gun-toting clown, the camp is also a site for brutal beatings and killings. During that time, we watch the two brash young men grow into wizened, embittered, sometimes petulantly squabbling old-timers. Sentenced to life imprisonment after a local frame-up and murder conviction, Ray and his angrier, straight-arrow driver, the equally hapless would-be bank teller Claude Banks (Lawrence), wind up in Mississippi's prison system for the next 67 years. In the movie, he plays Rayford Gibson, a small-time Harlem pickpocket and motormouth grifter who runs afoul of the law during a bootlegging run in Mississippi in 1932. It's not Murphy's "Life Is Beautiful," but it could have been. And, even if it doesn't reach the higher laugh levels of Murphy's 1996 "Nutty Professor" - or catch all the tougher, sadder veins director Ted Demme and writers Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone try to tap - this film is something special. Set primarily in a harrowing but sometimes incongruously jolly prison camp - a sunny, open place where there are no bars or fences but inmates are kept at bay by trigger-happy guards - it's a movie about unlikely friendships, social injustice and surviving the worst.
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