I snuck out the other day to catch the new Ashton Kutcher/Bernie Mac film, Guess Who. Now, as a rule, I’m not really a Kutcher fan, and I usually like my Bernie Mac in easily digestible, half-hour TV chunks. But I knew I had to see this because it’s a remake of Very Important Negro Actor Sidney Poitier’s Very Important Film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

I’ve always been fascinated Sidney Poitier’s Very Important Filmwork of the ’60s, just because of the tragedy of seeing the actor bound by the weight of his place in history—the very heaviness of his Great Negritude. Whether you’re talking about A Patch of Blue or To Sir, With Love or Lilies of the Field, Poitier’s performances were always consumed with self-awareness of his work being Important for the Race. Even in In the Heat of the Night, a humdinger of a thriller, there’s the shadow of Poitier’s position of Very Important Negro Actor hanging over the proceedings. Hell, to this day, my Alabama-born father almost tears up when he talks about the scene where Poitier’s character slaps a racist Southerner and makes him cry.

And of all of these Very Important Films, none was quite so important as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn play the parents of a girl who’s—gasp!—engaged to a Negro. Said Negro is, of course, played by Sidney Poitier in all of his ’60s clean-cut, straight-standing splendor. At some point, his parents show up too and, boy, is there some hand-wringing!

Oddly enough, there’s almost zero actual conflict in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner because . . . no one is actually against the two of them marrying. Everyone’s worried about “what the world will think” about the interracial relationship, but that’s it. Yes, it was all Very Important, but it was also very boring. Still, I was curious about what the filmmakers would do with the issue of interracial dating in a modern context, and how the remake would fit with the original.

Guess Who certainly isn’t boring. It’s kind of a lesser Meet the Parents. Bernie Mac’s daughter brings home the very white Ashton Kutcher to an unsuspecting family; hilarity ensues. And that icky racial stuff? Well, it’s kinda like when you were a kid and you rushed through your Brussels sprouts to get to your delicious dessert of chocolate cake. Every now and then there would be something about Kutcher’s whiteness, just because, well, that’s what the movie was supposed to be about, but then they would get right back to the Bernie Mac/Ashton Kutcher wackiness.

In a way, the difference between the two films shows all the progress we’ve made as a culture. About 40 years ago, the whole issue of interracial relationships was so controversial that you had to cast a perfect black man in the role and, even then, the weight of race was so heavy that filmmakers couldn’t show the couple being affectionate with each other until the very end, when the viewer sees them kiss . . . in a reflection. Nowadays, it’s implied that the on-screen couple is sexually active in the commercials. Once again there’s no real conflict, but this time it’s because the real meat of the movie is the relationship between the two male leads. Again, Guess Who has more in common with Meet the Parents than with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. And that’s a good thing.

Except . . . I kept thinking, Why did it have to be a comedy? And why did you have to change the composition of the relationship for it to be a comedy? Couldn’t this movie have starred, oh, I don’t know, Nick Cannon and Jerry Stiller? Or would Cannon’s black maleness still be too heavy for jokes? Why is the very concept of a black family being upset over their daughter marrying a white man funny?

It’s like the filmmakers flipped the original racial structure around because, hey, it’s ridiculous to think that anyone would be mad that their daughter is marrying Ashton Kutcher. Yes, it would be wrong for the black family to be upset, but at least treat the issue with respect.

Forty years later or not, it’s telling to compare Poitier’s aforementioned racial heaviness with Kutcher’s weightlessness. Whether it’s Guess Who or Bend It Like Beckham or The Joy Luck Club, somehow the white guy always gets a pass. Sure, there’s an acknowledgement of race, but overall the white lead just floats through whatever cultural and racial issues come up. Folks should be judged as folks, to be sure, but there’s some troubling subtext about racial currency at play when it’s just taken for granted that brown people are always the ones that are the problem.

It’s that reluctance to even address such disparity that makes me hesitate to fully sign off on Guess Who. Hopefully, someone will deal with this thing before 2045, when Hollywood brings us Guess, the story of a black man who brings home his white male lover.

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