I Think I Love My Wife Release Date: March 16, 2007 Starring: Chris Rock, Kerry Washington, Gina Torres, Cassandra Freeman, Samantha Ivers Directed by: Chris Rock
Chris Rock's I Think I Love My Wife is less interesting, and less successful, as a remake of a much-bruited '70s art film than it is as a compendium of Rockian observations on the current state of the African-American bourgeoisie. Said observations begin when Rock's character, Richard Cooper (aka "Dick" Cooper, which is Rock's idea of clever wordplay on the idea of pent-up sexuality) gets in from Long Island to his Manhattan investment banking firm and says, in voice-over "I think I know every black person that works at the firm" and is then seen saying hello to a cleaning lady and an elevator maintenance guy and backing away in the elevator from a too-hip-hop-nation messenger. (The same sequence also weirdly underscores co-writer/director Rock's De Niro/Scorsese fandom; Rock is seen at a newsstand where a magazine cover of De Niro is prominently displayed less than a minute before Rock enters the firm of Pupkin and Langford, ar ar ar.)
The '70s art film from which I Think was remade from is Eric Rohmer's Chloe in the Afternoon, recently rechristened to its original French title L'Amour l'apres-midi for its DVD release as part of the Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales box from The Criterion Collection. For the first third or so, the ways in which Rock hews to the original — having his Cooper express the same preference for late lunches as his progenitor, a scene in which he's quasi-bullied by a female salesperson into buying a clothing item that's not his "style," and so on — is kind of heartening. But soon enough Rock takes this story of a contentedly (sort of) married man who's confronted with a very fleshly manifestation of a temptation he's been keeping in the realm of his fantasy life his own way, full on. Which has its advantages. The inclusion of Biz Markie's "Just A Friend" on the soundtrack — not just on the soundtrack, but as a kind of plot point — could in fact be considered something of an improvement on Rohmer's film.
With some other aspects of I Think, not so much. While Chloe in the Rohmer film is an aging bohemian who pursues a married man not just to maintain her own sense of free-spiritedness but to squelch a sad, neurotic loneliness, Kerry Washington's Nikki is a straight-up predator out of some Tyler Perry nightmare, pitting Cooper against his wife and behaving more like a spiteful tease than a credible seductress. Hence making Cooper actually look more like a stooge than did the protagonist of Rohmer's film. On the other hand, the film's clueless misogyny does give rise to a fairly funny joke about "Asian porn." So there's that.
