The Great Debaters
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Movie Reviews of The Great Debaters
Movie Review: A Tragic Triumphant Film
Summary: 5 Stars
Professor Melvin Tolson, the character in this movie played by Denzel Washington, describes debate as a "blood sport." Hollywood has taken his words to heart; this film has all the formulaic qualities of a sports film about an underdog team that triumphs despite external and internal obstacles. A hockey team, a minor league baseball team, the plot outline is the same. There was a real triumph upon which this film is based; in 1935, the debate team from the "colored" Wiley College of Marshall, Texas, did in actuality travel to California and win its historic debate against USC, then the national debate champions. The film fictionalizes that debate, transposing the event to Harvard College; nevertheless, literally a true story or not, the cinematic triumph is emotionally powerful and meaningful.
Tolson was a real person, a poet and teacher associated with the "Harlem Renaissance." Likewise, the father and son characters in the film - James Farmer, Sr. and Jr. - were real people. The portrayal of these three is as close to biographical veracity as anyone could ask. The other two 'debaters' are said to be based on real people, but their names have been changed and their characters are essentially fictionalized. I have some hesitation about this Hollywood fictionalizing of such significant historical events; I would have preferred less glamour and more candor.
What is NOT fictional -- what is tragic -- is the portrayal of Jim Crow apartheid and racial violence in America. The events portrayed in the film occurred in the 1930s, but enough of segregation, racial humiliation, and racist depravity still existed in the 1950s for me to remember it and to testify in this court of opinion. The cars were different from those in the film but the bigotry and cruelty were the same. I spent my junior high and high school years in Tennessee, Florida, Arkansas, and then in rural communities in California that were culturally Southern satellites. Yes, yes, I KNOW that racism existed in the North, West, Midwest, etc., but the institutionally sanctioned apartheid of the South was different -- more humiliating, more violent, more absolutely a deprivation of any decent kind of life.
[...]
This film vividly reminds me of that shame. But I also feel a twinge of pride and self-esteem at having been a very small part of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s. James Farmer Jr., the 14-year-old Wiley College student in the film, was a hero of mine then, an activist with CORE and SLID (SDS), two organizations I had a tiny part in. He's the person who coined the phrase "Freedom Ride", and I was a Freedom Rider, going south from Harvard (of all places!) and taking my share of terror and rough treatment. Any American my age who wasn't a Freedom Rider missed the chance to partake of the noblest and most redemptive act of our lives.
Watching this film in February of 2009 puts it in a special perspective. It was made and released in 2007, at a time when very few people would have dared to predict that an African-American would be elected President of the USA in November 2008! And that's the true triumph, of which the Wiley College debate-team victory was a symbolic foretaste. The fact that Denzel Washington, an African-American, is a box-office star for White as well as Black audiences is also a triumphant outcome of the long struggle for Civil Rights. Washington, it's worth knowing, donated $1,000,000 to Wiley College, after the filming, to re-establish its debate team. Who in Marshall TX in 1935 could have imagined a Negro with a million bucks to give away, or a Negro President?
It should be obvious by now that I can't evaluate this film as a piece of entertainment or a feat of acting. The events mean too much to me. Watch it and weep! And cheer!
Movie Review: A Forgotten Poet Gets His Due
Summary: 5 Stars
When reading about what may be described as the lesser celebrated heroic figures of the Harlem Renaissance, we rarely get a definitive look at just how complicated and sometimes dangerous their everyday lives were. In fact, until the past ten years, many defined the period primarily by its well-known literary, musical, and artistic elements while overlooking the fact there was any political component to it at all. THE GREAT DEBATERS corrects both oversights by giving us an extraordinary portrait of poet and educator Melvin B. Tolson (1898-1966) portrayed with convincing restraint by Denzel Washington, who also directed the movie. At the same time, it delivers an exciting story filled with the creative intellectual genius that characterized the Harlem Renaissance, the thrill of youthful romance, and the painful loss of innocence.
Tolson, historically, is known largely as the celebrated author-poet of "Rendezvous with America" (1944); "Libretto for the Republic of Liberia" (1953); and "Harlem Gallery" (1965). But we meet him in The Great Debaters, prior to his literary fame, as a professor of English at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. By day he teaches and guides his students through the passion-filled topics of the era: labor rights, race relations, public welfare policies, and personal ethics. By night he is a labor organizer who runs the risk of imprisonment or getting lynched when he meets with Whites and Blacks to convince them to organize unions to protect their rights as workers. His efforts cause him to become branded as a communist, and therefore distrusted as a threat not merely to labor laws (or the lack of any significant ones at the time) but to American democracy.
Nate Parker as Henry Lowe, Jurnee Smollett as Samantha Brooke, and Denzel Whitaker as 14-year-old James Farmer, Jr. all give inspired performances in their roles as Tolson's brilliant student debaters who endure challenge after challenge before earning an invitation to debate the team at Harvard. With the odds stacked solidly against them, they nevertheless pull off an historical win. Just as significant as the final team's triumph, is the footnote identifying these students as future community leaders and history-makers in their own right. Henry Lowe would go on to become an influential minister, Samantha Brooke a lawyer, and Farmer a founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
Much has been made of the fact that The Great Debaters is the first major film project on which media empress Oprah Winfrey (one of the film's producers) and two-time Oscar-winner Denzel Washington have worked together. Of equal significance, if not greater, is the fact that in addition to Washington the movie features powerhouse Oscar-winning actor Forest Whitaker as Dr. James Farmer, Sr. How many movies are there, after all, in which two Academy Award-winning African-American actors play characters of historical consequence like Tolson and Farmer? More important than the novelty is the contrast between the two, somewhat like the classic divergence noted later between Martin Luther King Jr.'s political philosophies and those initially espoused by Malcolm X. The differences between Tolson and Farmer, however, appear more subtle and that very likely is due to Robert Eisele's amazing screenplay.
The hype and buzz surrounding The Great Debate sometimes comes across as a bit over the top. Despite that, the movie is actually far more excellent than anything you've likely heard about it.
By Author-Poet Aberjhani
author of "The Bridge of Silver Wings"
and Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Facts on File Library of American History)
Movie Review: A Case Of Black Pride
Summary: 5 Stars
Although there is some confusion, if not controversy, surrounding the facts on which this commercial film "The Great Debaters" is based it is nevertheless a well-done piece of cinema. When one says the name Denzel Washington, who starred in and directed the film, and adds the imprimatur of Ophrah Winfrey as producer then those factors alone usually insure a well thought out presentation. Add in a slice of pre-1960's civil rights movement Southern Jim Crow black history surrounding the extraordinary abilities of the debate team at Wiley College, a small black Texas college, and the headline of this entry - "A Case Of Black Pride"- tells the tale.
The subject matter of this film: the trials and tribulations of a debate team as it tries to make its mark in the intellectual world would not, on the face it, seem to be a natural subject for a two hour film. Nor would the fact that this debate team was composed of and led by the black "talented tenth" of the 1930's, including James Farmer, Jr. who would later will fame as a main stream "establishment" civil rights leader (and the scorn of younger black militants in the 1960's). However it does. The glue here is the performance of Denzel Washington as the somewhat mysterious hard-driving Northern black intellectual (and friend of Langston Hughes whose work in Spain in the 1930's I have explored elsewhere in this space). Professor Tolson, however, is more than some eccentric college don because he has enlisted in the struggle (or was sent, probably by the Communist or Socialist Party who were both organizing this strata of the agrarian working class in the South at the time) to organize the desperately poor black and white Texas sharecroppers. That story is also a subject worthy of separate discussion at a later time.
As the story unfolds we get a glimpse at black college life in the 1930's with its marching bands, its social life and its pecking orders. What that part of the film looked like was the universality of the college experience, except here everyone was black. The mere fact of being in college in the 1930's, at the height of the Great Depression meant that these student were training to be part of the black elite. Along the way, however, a different reality intrudes, as we are also exposed to black life in the South- Jim Crow style, even for W.E.B. Dubois' "talented tenth". Two of the most dramatic scenes in the movie are when Reverend James Farmer, Sr., by all accounts an extremely learned man if somewhat distant father, is humbled by some local "white trash"-for merely driving while black and the seemingly obligatory gratuitous lynching of a black man that the debate team witnessed in its travels. Powerful stuff.
The controversy surrounding the facts, if that is the case, is the question of whether the centerpiece of the 1935-36 debating season, a debate with the august Harvard University team actually occurred and whether the subject matter of this seminal debate was on the virtues and vices of civil disobedience. This would hardly be the first, and will probably not be the last, commercial film to "juice up" the story in order to create better dramatic tension. In short, to make it a "feel good" movie for the black and progressive audiences that I assume it was intended to reach. That should not take away from the achievements of this debate team, the courage of Professor Tolson in organizing Southern sharecroppers or the hard reality of "lynch law" in the Jim Crow South of the 1930's. Well acted, well thought out and well-intended it deserves a careful watching. Do so.
Movie Review: A truly inspirational film
Summary: 5 Stars
A truly inspirational film...
By now, we have seen this film several times, but last night... Lisa and Pablo Moreno, Alessandra Prado, Nadya, Alex and I watch because we were engaged on a rather deep debate over the political contenders for this year's election... and we decided to share with them a movie that truly explains the meaning of a debate... A war of ideals, perceptions and opinions... where our weapons are... words!!!
After seeing this movie for the first time, I researched the story only to realize that the story is based on a real life story that inspired a change of the way our Nation thinks and planted the seeds for the Civil Rights movement in the United States.
Melvin B. Tolson, played by one of our favorite actors, Denzel Washington is a professor at a college in Texas that encourages young people to participate in the discovery of the fire within... as he tells one of his students during a training lesson: "we are here to challenge your thinking process to make sure you regain your mind."
Professor Tolson creates a debate club that goes from school to school testing their wits with the best, but they debate and he writes their opinions, something that teaches these young people to think provocatively, but in essence, the messages are not truly theirs.
While he is a professor during the day, he champions causes at night but organizing sharecroppers and laborers. He is seen as a communist by some, a radical by others and a danger to many by those in power because he is inspiring change.
Among those he selects for the 1935 team we find James Farmer Jr. masterfully played by Denzel Whitaker, Henry, played by Nate Parker and Samantha, the first female to ever join the debate team, beautifully played by Jurnee Smollet.
James is only 14 years old and already in college, the best researcher the team has ever had, eloquent, vivacious and always hopeful and happy. Many experiences chisel away at their beliefs until they find their own voice and what a voice it becomes. The debates are inspirational, the struggle to understand simply magnificent, and the real life lessons reveal the trauma experienced by African Americans that grew at a time when lynching a man in Texas was common place.
There are moments of joy but plenty of moments where the viewer is left in shock at the atrocities inflicted by rural whites on African Americans whose only crime was to be different.
One of my favorite moments comes when James Farmer Jr. realizes that there is no hope, they are debating in a world where they are nothing more than "negroes" in a world that does not accept or welcomes their ideals, and troubled Henry givens him strength again, crying out loud: "don't give up James, not you!"
They win wherever they debate and Harvard becomes aware of this team and invites them to debate on their campus, and this debate is the ultimate climax to an inspirational film, where they are no longer allowed to say the words prepared by their professor, but told they must prepare their arguments themselves. After a period of rigorous soul-searching they argue from the heart, and while the Harvard team was brilliant, they spoke from the conviction of those who had never lived the reality of the south... Simply magnificent to see a body of highly educated intellectuals rendered silent by truths that were abhorrent but the truth of the south none-the-less.
Movie Review: Count 'Em -- Five Stars!!!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
Great movie!
The only thing I would do is to take out all the things Oprah Winfrey has to say in the DVD extras. What is ti with that gal? Ok, so you're a trillionaire, Oprah, no doubt as executive producer Denzel bamboozled a lot of dough out of you, BUT HAVEN'T WE HEARD ENOUGH ALREADY FROM YOU? Just keep giving away automobiles and shut up, k?
As for the movie, all the new young actors were superb. I hesitated watching this movie because I thought: how can anyone make a movie about *debating* interesting?
Finally, I realized -- hey, wait a second, Denzel, Denzel Washington. God! Everything he does is good and right, pure and omniscent.
Denzel Washington, upon whom the Celluloid World rises and sets. Denzel Washington, who can leap buildings in a single bound. (And I mean that. With an unbelievable amount of sincerity.)
And he didn't fail. As both actor and director, he did an excellent job. He's worth all the million of dollars he gets. More so than ... even me.
I can't say that his acting in this movie was as good as the movie overall, which was excellent, but I'm giving the movie five stars and if the estate of Carl Sagan doesn't like it they can kiss me in the Astor Bar.
One other thing that I found rather amusing. Towards the end of the movie the Wiley College students go to Boston to debate the Harvard team. There they are told that the topic for debate is "Resolved: Capitalism is Immoral." Then, at the last minute, they're told that due to a technicality (their teacher wasn't supposed to help them with their research) that the debate topic will be changed to "Resolved: Civil Disobedience Can Be a Moral Weapon in the Fight For Justice."
lol
In the words of that great American philosopher Dana "The Church Lady" Carvey: "How conveeeeeenient!" ... I mean, wouldn't you love to see a movie that Oprah Winfrey produced wherein there's a debate about the morality of capitalism. ... Oprah the Filthy Rich Billionaire.
And then of course guess what? Guess who takes the affirmative of the *new* debate topic, "Resolved: Civil Disobedience Can Be a Moral Weapon in the Fight For Justice."
I wonder why they even suggested debating the morality of capitalism. Perhaps Oprah decided to become a socialist, and Denzel talked her out of it at the last minute. To paraphrase Willie Loman's next door neightbor, Charlie: "Are you a socialist, Oprah; or still working?")
But why indicate that Wiley was originally going to debate the morality of capitalism? It seems to me that the filmmakers want it both ways. They realize that during the Depression there were indeed a great many people who considered capitalism to be not just immoral but brutal, destructive and anathema to the human condition. So they pay lipservice to that historical sentiment but, political cowards that they are, they quickly retreat to a premise -- civil disobedience in the face of unjust laws is permissible -- that's impossible to disagree with, let alone lose to in a debate.
In short, Oprah is going to KEEP THE BILLIONS!!!
She may wave to a socialist or two from her limousine. But don't count on it.
After all, truth, morality and justice may be sacred ... but profit is divine.
Right, Oprah?