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A
CROOKED WHITE LAWYER RUNS OVER AN HONEST BLACK TELEMARKETER
IN CHANGING LANES
 African
Americans are accustomed to being screwed by the power structure
in American society. In Changing Lanes, insurance
salesmarketer Doyle Gipson (played by Samuel L. Jackson),
a recovering alcoholic, is driving on the FDR Expressway to
a child custody hearing when Wall Street attorney Gavin Banek
(played by Ben Affleck) totals his car. Rather than exchanging
insurance information, as Gipson would prefer, Banek gives
him a blank check and drives off, but leaving behind a valuable
document that Banek needs to produce in court that same day.
Denied a ride by Banek, Gipson walks off the freeway, with
the document in his pocket, and arrives late for the custody
hearing. The judge rules that Gipson must surrender full custody
of his two pre-teen boys to his former wife. Although Gipson
objects that he has arranged payment for a house in Queens
as a gift to his wife and children so that they can stay near
their father instead of moving to Portland, as his wife proposes,
the white judge gavels him down because he arrived late to
the hearing. Meanwhile, Banek appears in court without the
document, and a black judge orders him to produce the document
before the end of the day. In a panic to recover the document,
Banek pays a computer hacker to track down Gipson rather than
making a polite phonecall. After the hacker arranges to bankrupt
Gipson, Banek calls him at work to leave a nasty message,
promising to return his credit in exchange for the document.
Meanwhile, Banek's conscience starts to bother him, as he
realizes that the document that he seeks was improperly extracting
money from a dying millionaire, so he could go to jail for
perpetrating a fraud upon the court. Next, Banek discovers
that the senior partners in his law firm, also implicated
in the fraud, stand to gain millions, and one partner even
arranges to forge the original document so that Banek will
not need to contact Gipson.
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Yet, Banek inexplicably continues to seek the original document,
not appreciating that his partners will proceed with the forgery
anyway. Gipson, who discards the document after the hearing,
unaccountably does not cash the blank check and retrieves
the document so that he can "do the right thing."
Next, Banek starts a rumor that Gipson is going to school
to kidnap his sons and then arranges a call to Gipson that
falsely implies that his sons have been injured; when Gipson
shows up to check on his sons, manifesting excitement, police
place him under arrest. His wife quickly learns where he is,
visits him in jail, and vows to move to Portland for sure.
Gipson's AA sponsor (played by William Hurt) then somehow
finds that he is in jail, bails him out, and bawls him out
without hearing Gipson's side of the story. Gipson then locates
Banek's car, unscrews the nuts holding one of the wheels,
and Banek crashes near the same site as the earlier accident.
Finally, Gipson brings the document to Banek in his Wall Street
office, no strings attached, and tells the story of his life.
Doubtless prodded by Hollywood executives, director Roger
Michell then shifts gears after providing a classic example
of how rich whites run over poor blacks without batting an
eyelash and instead has Banek decide not only to blackmail
his boss (played by Sydney Pollock) with the original document
but also to persuade Gipson's wife to stay in New York to
live in the house to be bought by newly creditworthy Gipson,
who presumably could have earlier reestablished his credit
and bought the house anyway with Banek's blank check. The
insane plot, in which a white man supposedly obtains some
kind of eleventh hour redemption from the honesty of a frustrated
black man, also has a scene in which Gipson gratuitously tells
two white bar patrons about how African Americans have been
treated miserably in American society, whereupon the bartender
tells Gipson to leave, the two taunt Gipson outside the bar,
and he preemptively knocks them down. Thus, a white man saves
a black family after wrestling with his conscience during
the day and deciding in the end to make a Faustian pact as
a Wall Street shyster who, in the words of his boss, will
do "more good than harm." Happy ending? This reviewer
would favor changing plots. MH
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