It's platitudinous to note that films based on true stories require structure even more than accuracy. I honestly can't figure out why Denzel Washington changed the venue of a seminal confrontation between a black university's debating team and its white rivals, from USC to Harvard unless it's because more people have heard of the latter. It certainly doesn't affect the potency of this life-affirming tale of a 1930's quartet of African-American debaters who all went on to significantly influence the cause of racial equality.
The film's recent Golden Globe nomination for Best Picture follows a series of very negative reviews among a growing number of positive ones. I'll predict the initial polarization of critical reaction to Washington's second directorial effort will continue, and I'll even suggest that some of those who are slamming the film may not even be aware of the prejudice in their tone.
Not that I think The Great Debaters is a great film, but it's certainly a very good one, and neither it nor its director deserves the roasting they're getting in certain quarters. The negative reaction is primarily American, and I believe more and more international opinion will help redress the balance. Such a pattern reminds me of the way Barbra Streisand was irrationally castigated for Yentl.
Surely that nameless amorphous national collective unconscious can't be holding a grudge against a box-office draw like Washington daring to 'get above' himself? Of course the mainstream media can't use such blatant and denigrating language, but trying to analyze the film objectively simply cannot lead to such unfair critical conclusions.
After a spate of powerful cinema treatments of the more shameful years that sully the Great American Dream, I believe Washington wanted to make a film that celebrated how the nation's story could resurrect its exquisite origins of equality and freedom. That it's a story of black voices should have no bearing on a fair judgement.
With the support of such prestigious co-producers as Oprah Winfrey and Joe Roth, Washington revisited Wiley College, in the heart of right-wing black-hating Texas, where in the mid-1930s an enlightened and highly educated Professor Melvin Tolson coached the debating team with wit, erudition, and a growing affection between him and the students he led to national prominence. The film weaves into that fabric Tolson's socially dangerous involvement as a union organizer in a quasi-political atmosphere that branded any resistance to the exploitation of workers as the work of the devil.
The personification of the devil in those days was Communism, and its widespread southern equation with uppity black folks helps explain a lot about why America resisted for so long Churchill's pleas to enter a war dedicated to fighting fascism with the help of a newly formed Soviet Union. Taking sides could cost your life in the run-up to that war.
So it's no wonder that a confirmation of Tolson's sympathies forced one of the debating quartet to walk out. In a land that identified black people as lower class [if not of a lower species], black students from the middle class were all too aware of the threat to their families if they didn't toe the line.
Although the film rightly concentrates on how a no-count dinky Texas school debating team honed its skills to gain national prominence, the script by Suzan-Lori Parks and Robert Eisele folds in both social relevance and a rocky romance.
The former involve some very uncomfortable scenes including the team's inadvertant witnessing of a white lynch mob burning a black man hanging from a tree. You can almost hear Billy Holliday's Strange Fruit. Earlier we've seen Forest Whitaker as James Farmer, the father of the youngest debater - a remarkable performance from teenager Denzel Whitaker, who's no relation either to Washington or Forest. When Farmer, a scholar, theologian and first black man to gain a doctorate in Texas, inadvertantly kills the pig of a devious sharecropper, he's as acquiescent as Stepan Fetchitt when the farmer holds him to ransom, demanding more than his entire month's salary in compensation.
These scenes strengthen the development of the film's characters, and are telling reminders of why a movement began that led to the resistence of the 1950s, the Power statements of the 1960s, and the tensions that continue to this day.
Unfortunately the romantic thread of the story, whether or not based on truth, not only feels imposed, but it's never properly developed in story terms. What's significant is that one of the team is a young woman who's fighting two battles in the war of equal rights. As aspiring lawyer and pre-feminist Samantha Booke, Jurnee Smollett turns in a performance of passion and maturity without sacrificing a youthful freshness.
Perhaps in their eagerness to produce a story that should get Americans celebrating what's good about the country, it was a bit of a cop out for us only to see the debaters speaking for the "good" side of their resolutions. The reality of debating teams is they must seek to convince whichever motion they speak to. In that sense it's a sport, and historically has been the sport of the educated classes that will influence decisions in every sphere of society.
Speaking only from a position of personal passion better serves the movie's purposes, and reminds us that these young history makers went on to shape society, including the founding of the Congress of Racial Equality by James Farmer Jr.
