The Tenants (2006)
Directed by: Danny Green
Starring: Dylan McDermott, Calvin 'Snoop Dogg' Dogg, Rose Byrne, Aldis Hodge
Genres: Comedy and Drama
Running Time: 97 min.
Release Date: February 3rd, 2006 (NY)
DVD Release Date: March 7, 2006
MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, some violence, sexual content and drug use.
Movie Trailer
THE TENANTS is based on the novel by Pulitzer Prize-Winning author Bernard Malamud, whose other adapted works into film include THE FIXER and THE NATURAL. A socio-political piece set in an abandoned New York apartment building in the early 1970s, It is the story of a Jewish novelist, Harry Lesser, struggling to complete his latest work, and his antagonistic relationship with a black writer who moves in down the hall. The film stars Dylan McDermott, Snoop Dogg, Rose Byrne and Seymour Cassel and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, 2005.
THE TENANTS is the story of two writers, the Lesser, Jewish-American, and Willie, African-American. The setting is an abandoned New York tenement in 1972. The last remaining tenant, Lesser works on his novel about the possibility of love. He befriends Willie, an illegal squatter, in the building and tries to help him with his writing. Their first argument occurs when Lesser criticizes Willie’s immature and ”black” writing style.
Lesser meets Willie’s white girlfriend Irene. The two fall in love and Irene leaves Willie. In revenge, Willie burns the only manuscript of Lesser’s novel that has taken almost ten years to write.
There is then a climactic life-and-death struggle, carried out with raw violence, between Lesser and Willie. As our story ends, in the words of Malamud, ”Each, thought the writer, feels the other’s anguish” is the last line of Lesser's novel.
And the meaning is clear - communication and cooperation between the races has failed.
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