Is this Will Smith’s great­est performance?

Upon hear­ing the news that Tom Hoop­er is tee­ing up to direct a movie ver­sion of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, fol­low­ing ​“joke” occurred: In going through all the rea­sons why you couldn’t make a movie of Cats, pre­sum­ably direc­tor Tom Hoop­er sud­den­ly saw how you could make a movie of Cats.

It is a altered quote from Fred Schepisi’s 1993 adap­ta­tion of John Guare’s hit play, Six Degrees of Sep­a­ra­tion. In it, the enig­mat­ic Paul (Will Smith) out­lines a set quan­daries that must have recent­ly passed through the mind of Hoop­er. How do you bring the musi­cal Cats to the big screen? The after­math of this joke, how­ev­er, did not lead to a deep con­sid­er­a­tion of how Hoop­er will tack­le the sub­ject of TS Eliot’s ​‘Old Possum’s Book of Prac­ti­cal Cats’, but rather a fond remem­brance of Smith’s incred­i­ble per­for­mance as Paul.

Smith’s act­ing career has been… let’s say, mild­ly errat­ic – it has been a long time since he real­ly got his hands dirty. His por­tray­al of a gay man, sup­pos­ed­ly the son of the real Sid­ney Poiti­er, who comes to call on afflu­ent art deal­ers Flan and Ouisa Kit­tredge, is one of most cre­ative, pow­er­ful and ded­i­cat­ed roles to date.

His fol­low-up role, as Detec­tive Mike Lowrey in 1995’s Bad Boys, does not offer half the range that we saw in his ear­ly turns in films like Made In Amer­i­ca and Six Degrees. Bad Boys also birthed the infa­mous Will Smith pout, indi­cat­ing when some­thing bad has hap­pened – over played to infin­i­ty in his lat­er, qua­si-seri­ous roles such fare as 2006’s The Pur­suit of Hap­py­ness and 2008’s Sev­en Pounds. Where the stiff upper lip meets the nose in a show of overt­ly restrained emotion.

In Paul, he is gift­ed with a char­ac­ter of extreme dual­i­ty. On the one hand there is the fast-talk­ing pros­ti­tute who seduces a prodi­gal son of a New York high-roller to teach­ing him the fin­er points of a bour­geois lifestyle. On the oth­er, there’s Paul: well spo­ken, intel­li­gent and charis­mat­ic. Both of these char­ac­ters are plucked from Smith’s own per­sona, as the clean cut rap­per and suc­cess­ful dar­ling of Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion, and the African Amer­i­can role mod­el from hum­ble begin­nings in West Philadel­phia. Essen­tial­ly Smith (and the film) is mock­ing the assump­tions of the those who sug­gest that you have to adopt a white man­ner to suc­ceed in the White media.

This is nev­er more dis­tinct­ly evi­dent then when Ian McKellen’s South African busi­ness­man, Geof­frey, sug­gests to Flan Kit­tredge (Don­ald Suther­land) that he should bring in Sid­ney Poiti­er to host a black film fes­ti­val. ​“With this Spike Lee you have now, and of course get Poiti­er down to be the pres­i­dent of the jury, and I know Cos­by, and I love this Eddie Mur­phy and my wife went fish­ing in Nor­way with Diana Ross and her new Nor­we­gian hus­band. And also they must have some new blacks.”

It is a provoca­tive line of dia­logue, with an even more provoca­tive dénoue­ment. Lit­tle did Smith know that he would be rel­e­gat­ed to these sorts of lists for much of his career. Arguably one of the most remark­able scenes of Smith’s act­ing career is Paul’s mono­logue describ­ing his the­sis on the JD Salinger’s ​‘Catch­er in the Rye’. In it he describes how the word ​‘imag­i­na­tion’ has become a trad­able com­mod­i­ty rather than a device we use to ratio­nalise the high­ly uncom­fort­ably real­i­ties of the world around us.

Paul wan­ders around a plush New York apart­ment, com­plete­ly engross­ing the Kit­tredge fam­i­ly with his rehearsed insight: ​“Why has imag­i­na­tion become a syn­onym for style? I believe that the imag­i­na­tion is the pass­port we cre­ate to take us into the real world.” Smith is a tow­er­ing fig­ure in mod­ern cin­e­ma, and were he only to heed the advice here and opt to make more of a con­nec­tion with the real world.