Brit drama White Teeth begins as well-crafted tale of cultures

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This article was published 11/05/2003 (8159 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FLIP a coin.

Heads, you live; tails, you die.

It’s an appalling notion, but the flip of a coin is also the guiding principle behind every big decision in Archie Jones’s life. And the really remarkable thing is that Archie, portrayed with dazzlingly dour desperation by English actor Phil Davis, isn’t anywhere near the quirkiest character in the new Masterpiece Theatre entry White Teeth.

The two-part Brit-import drama, which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. on PBS, is an appealing mishmash of cultures and characters adapted from novelist Zadie Smith’s award-winning first novel of the same name.

Archie Jones ranks among the most nondescript of life’s losers, a decidedly un-heroic Second World War veteran whose “career” as a professional envelope-folder has been as woefully unfulfilling as his recently failed marriage.

It’s New Year’s Eve, 1974, and Archie is about to decide whether or not to end it all. The toss comes up heads, so Archie connects a length of hose to his car’s exhaust pipe and sets about the grim business of killing himself.

Being the complete failure that he is, however, Arch has parked his car in a no-stopping zone, and an angry delivery-van driver wrenches his driver’s door open and saves the would-be victim from himself.

Dazed but somehow rejuvenated, Archie wanders along the avenue until he passes a hippy commune in the throes of an end-of-the-world-themed New Year’s party. He crashes the bash, and immediately encounters Clara Bowden (Naomie Harris), a recent arrival at the commune after fleeing her repressive Jehovah’s Witness mother’s smothering influence.

As the clock counts down toward midnight, Archie and Clara share an embrace — one that she believes will be her last, because her mother has spent years force-feeding her the idea that the world will indeed end on this very evening.

It doesn’t, of course. And life begins anew for Archie and Clara.

There’s also a new lease for Archie’s wartime pal Samad Iqbal (Om Puri), who has recently arrived from Bangladesh to finalize his arranged marriage to Alsana (Archie Panjabi), to whom he has been betrothed since before her birth.

What the two men are about to learn is that marrying a headstrong woman half your age is a gamble fraught with perilous complications.

White Teeth follows the two families through the next 20 years of their lives, through pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing, dead-end jobs, extramarital indiscretions and some of the painful choices that parents — particularly those trying to carve out a mixed-culture existence in a tough blue-collar town — must make.

In tonight’s opener, Samad’s guilt over his own failure of Muslim faith prompts him to make a difficult choice regarding the cultural training of his twin sons, and Archie finds that his inability to make a forceful decision causes him to drift ever farther from his wife and daughter.

Adding extra complications to an already convoluted set of storylines is a third family — well-to-do geneticist Marcus Malfen (Robert Bathurst) and wife Joyce (Geraldine James), a famous gardener — whose condescending interest in minority cultures ultimately proves quite problematic for the Joneses and the Iqbals.

The first half of White Teeth is a beautifully crafted tale of cultures and personalities, but next week’s two-hour conclusion — in which author Smith and/or screenwriter Simon Burke attempt to resolve the various colliding storylines, becomes just a little too much to be believed.

The harder the script tries to wrap things up in a neat bundle, the more the drama’s logic comes unravelled. And that’s too bad, because the performances by this exceedingly diverse cast remain top notch right to the very unlikely ending.

It might not quite be deserving of the “Masterpiece” portion of the PBS series’ title, but White Teeth certainly provides more than its share of reasons to smile.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca