LILA & EVE
DIRECTOR: Charles Stone II
CAST: Viola Davis, Jennifer Lopez, Aml Ameen, Ron Caldwell, Andre Royo, Shea Whigham
CLASSIFICATION: 13 LV
RUNNING TIME: 94 minutes
RATING: **
Viola Davis can do tragedy, earning Oscar nominations for such heartbreaking roles as a Jim Crow-era maid in The Help and the mother of a troubled student in Doubt. In Lila & Eve, the actress has plenty of opportunity to demonstrate those skills as the grieving single mother of Stephon (Ameen), a teenager killed in a drive-by shooting.
But when the film suddenly switches gears into a revenge fantasy, she’s on less solid footing.
Davis plays Lila as a woman coping with loss any way she can – pills, wine – and struggling to be present for her surviving son (Caldwell). More constructively, she’s in a support group called Mothers of Young Angels. It’s there that she meets Eve (Lopez), a grieving mother whose anger makes her stand out in a crowd of meek figures so brittle they seem like they could break at any moment. After Eve’s young daughter was killed, the police didn’t bother investigating, she tells Lila, warning her that the same thing might happen with Stephon’s as-yet unsolved murder.
Eve has a point. The two detectives assigned to the case (Royo and Whigham) haven’t made much headway and don’t even bother returning Lila’s calls.
At Eve’s instigation, Lila decides to do some detective work. In a store parking lot, the women confront a drug dealer whom they suspect is connected to Stephon’s killing. Before you know it, that man is also dead, and the pair are fleeing the scene. This paves the way for a string of Death Wish-style vigilante justice and a rapidly rising body count.
Davis is an excellent actress and her poignant scenes of woe aren’t the only standouts. Ameen and Caldwell have a natural rapport in their scenes together, and these lighthearted flashbacks, in which Lila is seen joking with her two boys, are bittersweet.
At moments such as these, this film asks viewers to take Lila & Eve seriously. Although Lopez – the reigning queen of cinematic camp – is in the film, the story does raise important questions about the way police assign task forces to investigate the deaths of white cheer-leaders, but not those of young black men.
And yet the movie is content to point to such thought-provoking notions without fully examining them, letting the bullets fly instead. Every time Lila seems like she might apply some morals to her quest, the movie pulls back. When a mother-of-two murdered brothers comes to the support group, Lila hardly reacts, despite the fact that she’s the one who killed those boys.
It’s at this point that the plot holes start appearing, in advance of a twist ending that’s hinted at so aggressively it’s nearly impossible not to see it coming. By the time the movie reaches its finale any trace of seriousness has been blown to bits.
In the end, Davis ends up a wasted resource. She does her best to elevate the material, but the story fails to live up to her considerable talents.
The Washington Post
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