By Armond White

Pride
Directed by Sunu Gonera


Pride, the new Terrence Howard film, is a beautiful anachronism. Set in 1974 and “inspired by” the true story of Jim Ellis, who coached a swim team in Philadelphia’s black ghetto to world class competitiveness, it’s nothing like the current fashion in black-themed movies. It’s more like those hardscrabble movies of the 1970s blaxploitation era that no one talks about anymore—Melinda, The Bus is Coming, Georgia, Georgia, Book of Numbers, Aaron Loves Angela, Man and Boy, The River Niger. People have forgotten those movies, not because they weren’t good enough, but because they weren’t “bad” like Shaft, Superfly and Three the Hard Way.

It’s the inspirational aspect of Pride that makes it anachronistic now when such lousy films—Black Snake Moan, I Think I Love My Wife, Dreamgirls and Waist Deep—reduce the  African-American experience to clichés of superstition, licentiousness, minstrelsy and crime. The real-life Jim Ellis revived the dilapidated community center of the Philadelphia Department of Recreation and encouraged black youths toward larger aspirations and against the above stereotypes. He defied Hollywood’s fashionable pathology. Some will dismiss Pride as schmaltz and sentimental, but that diabolical attitude merely prefers noxious, pessimistic fantasies that deny human possibilities.

Terence Howard, who co-produced Pride, displays a singular soulfulness different from other contemporary black film actors as he conveys Jim Ellis’ struggle as a modern passion. The film’s script bases Ellis’ conviction in the backstory, 10 years earlier, of his own discrimination and exclusion from competitive sports. When Howard’s Ellis watches a new generation respond to his encouragement and fulfill their potential, his misty-eyed observation carries the weight of history. Here, Ellis’ discipline to a tardy swimmer (“You don’t want to leave, and I don’t want you to leave”) feels real and rich.

Zimbabwean director Sunu Gonera resists Hollywood’s badass conventions. His earnest melodrama recalls the potential lost during the blaxploitation era when filmmakers chose to tell stories of black struggle or black jive. Jive won out, as Melvin Van Peebles has lamented (citing how Hollywood copied the success of Sweet Sweetback while extracting its politics). But Pride revives the genuine perseverance of African-American culture’s griot tradition.

The racist discrimination faced by Ellis and his team is an important historical detail. Howard and the solid supporting cast of older actors—Bernie Mac, Kimberly Elise and Tom Arnold—attest to the reality of racism better than Jerry Bruckheimer’s jock uplift films. The actors’ authenticity—their credible sense of how racism works—syncs with the film’s extraordinary choice of period pop tunes that evoke the nuances of ’70s Afro-Am struggle. This music undercuts social lassitude and expresses the characters’ hidden essence.

Pride’s look also recalls the low-budget blaxploitation era through Matthew Leonetti’s high-contrasty photography. A Walter Hill veteran, Leonetti should do better, yet he tones down during the swim meets, providing silhouettes of the swimmers’ bodies worthy of Olympiad. The films Drumline and Smooth Running were slicker sports entertainments, but Pride has uncommon substance.