What is lakeview terrace about

Sign In. Play trailer Crime Drama Thriller. Director Neil LaBute. David Loughery screenplay Howard Korder screenplay. Samuel L. Jackson Patrick Wilson Kerry Washington. Top credits Director Neil LaBute. See more at IMDbPro. Trailer Lakeview Terrace: Theatrical Trailer. Photos Top cast Edit. Jackson Abel Turner as Abel Turner. Michael Sean Tighe Manager as Manager. Neil LaBute. From certain angles, Lakeview Terrace may look neurotic or even reactionary, but I found it bracingly tactless, particularly because interracial couples are still something of a taboo in modern Hollywood: I remember the stir caused by the interracial fling in Mike Figgis's One Night Stand , in which the perceived transgressions of sex and race were coolly juxtaposed with the issue of HIV.

In the end, the story has to be wrapped up somehow, and the finale is a little strained, although the rest of the plot is neatly constructed, creating a space for Abel's snitch in its suspenseful final act.

Neil LaBute is a director whose place in cinema history has, for my money, already been secured by his magnificently horrible satire In the Company of Men.

Nothing he has done since then really compares, but Lakeview Terrace shows him still looking for the pressure points, still looking for the key to wind us up. Lakeview Terrace — review. Tremendously watchable Samuel L Jackson in Lakeview Terrace. Reuse this content. The decent person does not visit his obsessions and prejudices upon his neighbor, but is enjoined to love him as he does himself. Since Turner Samuel L.

Jackson may hate himself, of course that is a problem. But take a step back. What if all the races were switched? If the neighbor were white, the husband next door black, his wife white? Same script. It would be the story of a sociopathic white racist.

It might be interesting, but it would have trouble getting made. The casting of Jackson as the neighbor creates a presumption of innocence that some will hold on to longer than the story justifies. Don't think for a moment that LaBute doesn't know audience members will be thinking about that switch of identities. He wants us to. All of his films feature nasty people who challenge nasty thoughts or fears within ourselves. Is this movie racist for making the villain black or would it be equally racist by making the villain white?

What's your answer? Jackson, a Los Angeles police veteran, lives on Lakeview Terrace, a crescent of comfortable suburbia in the hills of the city. The lots are pie-shaped, so the houses are placed close together, but the lots open out into big backyards. They seem fairly recently married, happy.

Turner starts slowly, dropping some subtly hostile remarks, and then escalates his war on this couple. I will not describe his words and actions, except to say he pushes buttons that make the Mattsons first outraged, then fearful, then angry -- at him, and each other.

Take another step back. Mattson's father-in-law, a successful attorney, is Newlywed interracial couple Chris and Lisa Mattson, ecstatically move into their first home in Los Angeles' Lakeview Terrace: a cul-de-sac of beautiful residences. Of course, the newcomers can't wait to start fresh; however, a brief first encounter with their next-door neighbor--intimidating, embittered, racist LAPD police officer and embittered racist Abel Turner--suggests that this will be a difficult, if not impossible, coexistence.

More and more, Abel takes great pleasure in pushing the unsuspecting couple's buttons, and his artfully unfriendly remarks rapidly lead to an ugly all-out confrontation triggered by a regrettable incident in the backyard pool.

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