Djimon Hounsou is so right now.

He's the mesmerizing hunk in loose-fit jeans, preening to John Lee Hooker's "Boom Boom" in a Gap commercial.

He's a key actor in the 19th-century military epic The Four Feathers, currently in theaters.

And if you happened to be in the Four Seasons recently, he was the tall, regal-looking guy who turned heads as he strolled through the hotel dining room.

Carelessly elegant in warm-up clothes and high-tech headphones that blocked out the whispers of onlookers, the 38-year-old from Benin in West Africa seemed made for the catwalk - where he would be perfectly comfortable, given his past as a runway model for French designer Thierry Mugler.

Yet, for all his refined hipness, Hounsou finds himself, once again, cast as a slave in Shekhar Kapur's new film. It's his third time in shackles, this go-round as the Sudanese slave/wise man who safeguards Four Feathers' star, Heath Ledger, a former British officer accused of cowardice.

The noble black sage - the wise, even mystical, subservient character who lives (and frequently dies) to elevate a film's white hero - was a Hollywood cliche long before Hounsou donned a loincloth five years ago for his breakthrough role of Cinque, the rebel slave in Steven Spielberg's Amistad.

D.W. Griffith's controversial The Birth of a Nation popularized the "mammy" and "tom" stereotypes in film 87 years ago. The Civil War epic contrasted "good" Negroes - loyal slaves who stuck with their white masters even after emancipation - with images of brutal black "bucks," whose rampages terrified white moviegoers.

Over the years, the "mammy" and "tom" stereotypes have softened into a new variant, says Jeff Hyson, a lecturer in media studies at St. Joseph's University: the saintly black who imparts his or her wisdom to hapless whites.

Think of Morgan Freeman's courtly chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy; Michael Clarke Duncan, the childlike prisoner in The Green Mile; Will Smith, the philosopher-caddy of The Legend of Bagger Vance; and Whoopi Goldberg in a passel of films, including two, Clara's Heart and Corrina, Corrina, in which she's the maid/mother figure.

It's "benevolent reductionism," Hyson charges, and it results in characters so one-dimensionally earnest and principled that they "just create another stereotype."

In Four Feathers, about British colonialism in North Africa, Hounsou (whose name is pronounced JIE-mon AHN-sue) is Abou, an ethereal presence who appears out of nowhere. He dispenses moral lessons and demonstrates a superhuman ability to sprint through the Moroccan desert. In the end, Abou literally walks into the sunset.

The tendency to make characters somehow otherworldly goes back to early narratives that depict African Americans as channelers of the spirit world, Hyson notes.

"[Blacks] always possess native intelligence and folk wisdom, as if the white character is possessed of book learning and the blacks of accidental knowledge," he says. "To do that is denying the black character as meaningful."

One of the most egregious examples of benevolent reductionism is in The Green Mile. The 1999 film starred Tom Hanks as a death-row security guard and Duncan as John Coffey, a slow-witted drifter wrongly accused of murdering two white girls. Coffey is a gentle behemoth who has a paranormal gift for healing. Finally, he chooses to be executed rather than speak out in his own defense.

"By the time it's over, you're feeling like Michael Clarke Duncan had to be in prison for his own personal benefit," that his execution "wasn't only the good thing to do, but the kind thing to do," Hyson says. "It's the type of [role] that clothes itself in righteousness."

It's also the sort of role that Hollywood tends to reward. Hounsou's performance as the honorable Cinque in Amistad netted him a Golden Globe nomination, and Duncan's poignant portrayal earned him an Oscar nomination. Freeman likewise was Oscar-nominated for Driving Miss Daisy.

The dilemma for African Americans is how to avoid such roles when there simply aren't that many quality parts for black actors to begin with.

"You need to make a living," says Lisa Gay Hamilton, who for five years has played idealistic lawyer Rebecca Washington in the ABC drama The Practice.

"I'm humbled to be employed and humbled to be on a show that has integrity," the actress says. Nevertheless, playing Washington has often left Hamilton, 38, unfulfilled. Viewers don't have a sense of who the character truly is, Hamilton says.

"The question becomes, what is the story you're telling about a human being? There is nothing wrong with playing a maid as long as there is an exploration of who she is... . The greatest story never told is the story of Aunt Jemima. [Hollywood] tends to be very one-sided in the way it tells stories."

To ensure that the women she plays show their humanity, Hamilton has begun producing her own projects. The latest is a documentary on actress Beah Richards, whom Hamilton met on the set of Beloved in 1998.

"Beah didn't die a rich woman," says Hamilton, who plans to submit her film to the Sundance Film Festival next year. "She played her share of maids. But with her roles she brought a certain truth and dignity."

"I tried to fight it," Hounsou says of his run of slave portrayals. After Amistad, director Ridley Scott cast the actor as the warrior-slave Juba, who befriends star Russell Crowe in Gladiator.

"I don't want to be remembered always as a slave," says Hounsou, who knows that his accent (he speaks several African dialects, French and English) and exotic looks present casting challenges. "In acting school, they wanted me to... talk like a homey. I knew I was never going to play those roles... . You can't curse it. You just have to allow for things to change."

Change will occur only when Hollywood develops black characters fully and works to tell stories from all points of view, filmmakers say.

Frank's Place, still among the handful of TV "dramedies" ever to feature a virtually all-black cast, was groundbreaking when it debuted on CBS in 1987. Tim Reid, who also was executive producer, played an Ivy League professor who inherited a restaurant and bar in New Orleans. The show was praised by critics for its fully realized characters, yet Frank's Place never found its audience either among blacks or whites.

Richard Dubin, who produced the series and now teaches television and film at Syracuse University, believes diversity will be achieved in Hollywood only when "people, all people, stop working with blinders on that exclude seeing lots of stuff, including race."

Until that time comes, black actors take what they can get. Hounsou is just excited that his forthcoming films - Biker Boyz, an action flick with Laurence Fishburne, and the sequel to Lara Croft: Tomb Raider with Angelina Jolie - get him out of the historical genre.

"It's a very nice thing to be thought of as an instrument of nobleness and wisdom," Hounsou says, "but it would be nice to wear a pair of jeans in a movie."