# Best Man, The (1999/I)

### reviewed by
Jonathan F Richards

    WRITER'S BLACK

    THE BEST MAN
    Written and Directed by
    With Taye Diggs, Nia Long
    UA North     R     118 min

"The Best Man" is a potboiler told with inoffensive slickness and dependable moral values, and peopled with an attractive ensemble cast. Its paperback plot involves Harper (Taye Diggs), whose first novel is about to be published as he heads for New York to be best man at his best friend's wedding. Advance copies are already circulating among the old college pals who are the core of the wedding party. Skeletons come tumbling out of closets as his friends recognize themselves and the things they did in college thinly disguised in Harper's autobiographical fiction. Since one of the things he did was sleep with the bride (Monica Calhoun), and since the groom (Morris Chestnut) is Lance, a monster running back for the New York Giants, this ill-timed early sampling of his roman-a-clef is particularly awkward for Harper, although the alert viewer will be wondering what the hell he thought the effect of his revelations would be on his pals if they'd surfaced after the wedding.

First time writer/director Malcolm D. Lee has a terrible weakness for exposition in the early scenes (which is where exposition traditionally rears its ugly head.) "Oprah wants my new unpublished novel *Unfinished Business*" Harper sings out to his girlfriend Robin (Sanaa Lathan) as he comes in the door. When Lance is introduced, Lee gives us a long closeup of the cross hanging around his neck, to establish his credentials as a Christian running back, which we will find out anyway soon enough.

But once you get by the exposition, the talented and beautiful cast of young African-American actors takes over and delivers a story of passions and friendships and self-discovery that, while far from original, still makes itself agreeable and satisfying. Taye Diggs, the hunk from "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" whose career is justifiably in meteoric rise, smiles his jaw-to-jaw perfect smile and takes his shirt off and throws in some good acting to boot. There's no letdown with the other actors, with the exception of Melissa DeSousa's gratingly bitchy Shelby, and particularly good are Harold Perrineau as the sweetly unassertive Murch and Terrence Howard as the sly, troublemaking Quentin. There are no white characters, which seems a little contrived in a group so pointedly mainstream.

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