Brooklyn dodgers HBO’s Everyday People addresses a troubled borough BY MATT ASHARE

There are disaster movies, like The Day After Tomorrow. And then there are movies that court a different sort of disaster by, say, giving the controversial African-American cultural critic/writer Nelson George a role in forming the script for a film about the gentrification of Brooklyn — "gentrification" being a euphemism that describes what happens to property values and the character of a neighborhood when white yuppies move in and displace African-Americans and other minorities. That film is Everyday People, a modest if not quite gritty slice-of-life vignette commissioned by HBO, directed by Jim McKay (Girls Town, Our Song), and co-produced by a number of persons, including McKay’s C-Hundred Film Corp partner Michael Stipe, and George, a Brooklyn resident who was a consulting producer on HBO’s Chris Rock Show when he came to the cable network in 1999 to propose doing a film that dealt with contemporary American race relations.

Thanks to a string of successful homegrown series of both the comic and the dramatic variety (The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Larry Sanders Show, Band of Brothers), as well as a number of award-winning documentaries, HBO has developed into an effective, surprisingly adventurous clearing house for all kinds of ideas deemed too risky for prime time or too narrow in scope for the full Hollywood treatment. And on paper at least, Everyday People — airing this week on HBO Sunday at 11 p.m. and Thursday (July 8) at 11:50 p.m. as well as on HBO2 tonight (July 1) at 8 p.m. and Monday at 6:30 p.m. — qualifies on both counts.

Not that indie filmmakers haven’t already explored the murky waters of race relations in Brooklyn: from Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing to the Wayne Wang/Paul Auster collaborations Smoke and Blue in the Face, the changing face of the borough has served as a potent backdrop for a number of race-related dramas, some comical, some nostalgic, others more blatantly provocative. But unless your last name is Lee and your films are called joints, chances are slim that anyone in Hollywood is going to care much about the state of a small piece of the nation 3000 miles away.

George shares Lee’s will to provoke, as well as a love/hate relationship with a Brooklyn in transition. But at some point along the way, Everyday People became Jim McKay’s joint in that, like Girls Town, it was workshopped in an improvisational environment rather than strictly scripted. Each member of the star-less ensemble cast was given a defined, in some cases almost cliché’d, role to play, and it’s here that George’s hand is most strongly felt. Ron Butler (Ron) is a light-skinned, thirtysomething African-American real-estate developer who looks forward to cleaning up Brooklyn by bringing in a Hard Rock Café, especially after he gets smacked around by a gang of hip-hop kids. Reg E. Cathey’s Akbar is an older African-American activist who sees the world in black and white, even though he’s harassed by the very same kids. Stephen McKinley Henderson’s Arthur is a world-weary African-American maître d’ at Raskin’s deli, on the site where Ron hopes to build his Hard Rock; he’s worried mainly about his own future in the changing cityscape.

On the white side of the fence stands Jordan Gelber as Ira, the second-generation Jewish owner of Raskin’s. He wants to make everyone happy, especially his employees, but realizes that he may no longer be in a position to do so. One of those employees is Sol the dishwasher (Stephen Axelrod), a one-time doctor with a checkered past and a 12-step meeting to get to who strikes out viciously at Ira when he hears that Raskin’s may be sold to Ron. There are half a dozen other subplots that deal with obvious issues of race and class. Erin, for example, is an upper-middle-class African-American waitress whose plans to leave college and become a poet clash with the ideals of her working-professional mom, Betty, who’s just been passed over for a promotion in favor of a younger white woman.

The characters are so neatly tailored to fit particular socio-economic archetypes that you could almost accuse George of racial profiling. But McKay’s low-key approach to filmmaking is well suited to exploring the gray areas of this black and white world. Everyday People is a dialogue-driven film in which each scene amounts to a philosophical showdown that can’t be neatly resolved. The film itself, which takes place over the course of a single day, never comes to any real resolution. It’s Spike Lee with no special effects, Blue in the Face without the celebrity cast — a feel-bad film that’s supposed to make you see past the rhetoric of urban planners and sociologists, the ideologues and the idealists, and into the hearts and minds of people who often get left behind when the world moves forward. There are no epic disasters here, but there is real tragedy.