The Landlord, a film about a wealthy white man moving into a poverty-stricken black neighborhood, is a quirky and engaging one. The dialogue throughout the film is terrific, and I felt myself sympathizing with pretty much every character, except Elgar at first. Elgar was a rich, overindulged kid that grew into an overindulged man. He decides to move out of his mother’s mansion to gain independence, to finally have control of his life.
Watching the film The Landlord, I did not see any gentrification. There is an attempted gentrification, as Elgar the landlord makes a shot at turning an apartment complex into a home for himself. And throughout the movie there is also an obvious comparison of the black community to the white, sometimes with Elgar making off-center comparisons himself.
“I swear he thinks the Lord put white people on this earth as a punishment.” Throughout The Landlord, the word white is synonymous with wealth, extravagance, and fun. The wealthy white characters mainly wear white (perhaps to emphasize how “regal” they are?) and in the scenes held in the Enders’ mansion, the words spoken are often silly and superficial. According to the film, white people do not have problems, and if they do, they’re insignificant snags that they blow out of proportion. Elgar’s has had enough of his trivial game. He leaves to find something more, and for a while he thinks he’s found it. “Do you know what NAACP means…” Almost immediately Elgar begins to identify with the black community, as they are not as justified or arrogant. He finds them to have much more substance than the people he as grown with. And as Elgar pulls away from the lifestyle he has grown up with we see him wearing less lightly colored clothes. In fact, in the scene in which Francine admits she’s pregnant, we see Elgar “fully assimilated” wearing a traditional African garment. Through dating a mixed woman, and living in an under-served community, Elgar feels as if he is an honorary black person, though he doesn’t really understand what is to be black.
“Christ has never known the horror of nappy hair in America.” These are the words Copee says as he is hauled into an ambulance after he nearly kills Elgar. In the film, the word black is synonymous with poverty, crime, and illiteracy. When Elgar tells his mother he is in love with a black woman, the image that comes to her mind is of a plump African woman dancing in her village. Apparently black people are rural, barbaric. They are not ambitious. They live in horrible conditions. But with their modest lifestyles comes a freedom that Elgar has never known. These people don’t have to act a certain way or portray a certain image of themselves to fully function. They do as they please. They sleep around, they steal, and they fight. And it is not until the last few moments of the movie that Elgar fully realizes that they are more than black, that they are more than their stereotype. Professor Du Bois brings Elgar to his class and through the words of the students and their proud chants of “I am black and I am beautiful,” Elgar realizes that as much as he has pretended to understand the black struggle, he still has much to learn.
I didn’t see much gentrification actually happen within the film, though through The Landlord I’m given a glimpse of what drives it: greed, selfishness. It’s not really about bettering a community, but advancing a community for oneself, and driving out the people who used to call the area home. This film, The Landlord reveals the true motivations behind gentrification. But this film is also a story of hope, as we see one man come out the attempted process a much better person.
