The Great Debaters
Directed by Denzel Washington
Maybe a bad movie feels less rotten if it reminds you of a great movie. Denzel Washington’s sanctimonious The Great Debaters makes one look back in gratitude to Clarence Brown’s 1949 masterpiece Intruder in the Dust. That’s because The Great Debaters’ plot (how a black debating team from Marshall, Texas, won over 100 championships in 1935) only shows depth when it evokes the more alarming subject of lynching—the topic Brown powerfully developed from a novel by William Faulkner.
Of course, it would take Denzel Washington’s transparent, do-gooder attempt at balancing the affront of his American Gangster to turn a movie about lynching into a pious bore, but it is The Great Debaters’ distance from those historical atrocities that causes it to fall so short of Intruder in the Dust’s authentic, haunting details. No viewer of Brown’s film can forget the sequence where nightriders cruise through the backwoods homes of Oxford, Mississippi’s blacks and automobile headlights scour the darkened cabins where families crouch in fearful and experienced-knowledge of Southern whites’ murderous capabilities. It is a quintessential scene of homegrown American terrorism. The nightride is so chillingly stylized by Brown’s combination of ominous atmosphere and documentary realism that even the term “film noir” becomes pitifully inadequate to describe the living nightmare that 20th century Americans knew but tentatively addressed. (Racial lynching is the phenomenon behind such quasi-enlightened movies as Fritz Lang’s Fury and William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident.)
In The Great Debaters, a team of college students (Jurnee Smollett, Nate Parker and Denzel Whitaker) lose their nerve after a road trip where they witness a lynching. “You’re never going to forget what you saw!” one screams to another. It suggests a trauma that is inauthentic to how Southern black Americans actually suffered and communicated the fact of lynching. That melodramatic alarm has more to do with Hollywood naiveté than with African-American forbearance and strength—and that’s what The Great Debaters gets wrong. It turns spiritual and social habit into greeting-card uplift.
Too bad more people will know the heavily hyped The Great Debaters than Intruder in the Dust, which is rarely shown or talked about by film scholars who shy away from the political and moral implications of what Brown depicted (including Juano Hernández’s commanding performance as Lucas Beauchamp, the intransigent black farmer who riles the film’s lynching parties). The psychological dread and social shame that Brown exposed—even in a daytime sequence where a lynch mob hosts a bloodthirsty, music-playing celebration (revealing the definitive meaning of the word “carnival”)—illuminated awful facts about American social and personal history. Tougher than Renoir’s The Southerner, better than all but a few movies. The moral weight of what Brown’s film laid on our culture crushes Washington’s misguided tale of Triumph. The Great Debaters touches upon something Washington and producer Oprah Winfrey aren’t prepared to grasp, yet wind up exploiting.
The Great Debaters commits the worst kind of sentimentalizing by using tortured political history as an inspirational bromide. Repeated mantras by Wiley College professor Tolson (portrayed by Washington) and the local Rev. Farmer (played by Forest Whitaker) that “Education is the only way out!” reduces cinema—and Black American history—to a fortune cookie. It glosses over the culture of lynching and everyday terrorism, resorting to bigoted sheriff and redneck pig-farmer clichés. A viewer can only tolerate this banality by recalling stronger, more honest images of American race history like Intruder in the Dust, the lynch party-entertainment sequence of Terence Davies’ 1996 The Neon Bible or the scene of hillbilly deprivation in Kevin Costner’s 1994 The War where a subtler view traced American racism to class-based deprivation.
Here, each debate scene features calculated topics (welfare, integrated education, civil disobedience) that preach at the audience—an old-fashioned, condescending concept (entertainment pedagogy) that Oprah and Denzel mistake for genuine black expression. It’s self-congratulatory, black-bourgeois point-making like in a Spike Lee movie. And efforts at characterizing the debate students’ ambitions and sexuality are trite, especially after the complex personalities seen in Akeelah and the Bee and Pride. Those films were about community habit as much as self-reliant striving and their young protagonists learned from conflicted mentors, not the teacher-poet-labor-organizer-superhero Denzel portrays with his customary smugness.
Dramas like The Great Debaters are only superficially fact-based; they become demoralizing masquerades for Hollywood filmmakers afraid to imagine the spiritual lives of non-famous black people. That these biopics epitomize creative failure is evident in this film’s inability to relate the daily terror of lynch-culture living: The fact that black families talked about it, girded themselves against it, indoctrinated their children into its dangers is left out of The Great Debaters’ emotional deliberations. No surprise that media moguls Denzel and Oprah chose this approach, glorifying a trio of promising young public performers, because The Great Debaters is not actually concerned with lynching, or little-known history that you need to know. Like Hollywood’s typical black biopics, it’s really about showbiz.
Directed by Denzel Washington
Maybe a bad movie feels less rotten if it reminds you of a great movie. Denzel Washington’s sanctimonious The Great Debaters makes one look back in gratitude to Clarence Brown’s 1949 masterpiece Intruder in the Dust. That’s because The Great Debaters’ plot (how a black debating team from Marshall, Texas, won over 100 championships in 1935) only shows depth when it evokes the more alarming subject of lynching—the topic Brown powerfully developed from a novel by William Faulkner.
Of course, it would take Denzel Washington’s transparent, do-gooder attempt at balancing the affront of his American Gangster to turn a movie about lynching into a pious bore, but it is The Great Debaters’ distance from those historical atrocities that causes it to fall so short of Intruder in the Dust’s authentic, haunting details. No viewer of Brown’s film can forget the sequence where nightriders cruise through the backwoods homes of Oxford, Mississippi’s blacks and automobile headlights scour the darkened cabins where families crouch in fearful and experienced-knowledge of Southern whites’ murderous capabilities. It is a quintessential scene of homegrown American terrorism. The nightride is so chillingly stylized by Brown’s combination of ominous atmosphere and documentary realism that even the term “film noir” becomes pitifully inadequate to describe the living nightmare that 20th century Americans knew but tentatively addressed. (Racial lynching is the phenomenon behind such quasi-enlightened movies as Fritz Lang’s Fury and William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident.)
In The Great Debaters, a team of college students (Jurnee Smollett, Nate Parker and Denzel Whitaker) lose their nerve after a road trip where they witness a lynching. “You’re never going to forget what you saw!” one screams to another. It suggests a trauma that is inauthentic to how Southern black Americans actually suffered and communicated the fact of lynching. That melodramatic alarm has more to do with Hollywood naiveté than with African-American forbearance and strength—and that’s what The Great Debaters gets wrong. It turns spiritual and social habit into greeting-card uplift.
Too bad more people will know the heavily hyped The Great Debaters than Intruder in the Dust, which is rarely shown or talked about by film scholars who shy away from the political and moral implications of what Brown depicted (including Juano Hernández’s commanding performance as Lucas Beauchamp, the intransigent black farmer who riles the film’s lynching parties). The psychological dread and social shame that Brown exposed—even in a daytime sequence where a lynch mob hosts a bloodthirsty, music-playing celebration (revealing the definitive meaning of the word “carnival”)—illuminated awful facts about American social and personal history. Tougher than Renoir’s The Southerner, better than all but a few movies. The moral weight of what Brown’s film laid on our culture crushes Washington’s misguided tale of Triumph. The Great Debaters touches upon something Washington and producer Oprah Winfrey aren’t prepared to grasp, yet wind up exploiting.
The Great Debaters commits the worst kind of sentimentalizing by using tortured political history as an inspirational bromide. Repeated mantras by Wiley College professor Tolson (portrayed by Washington) and the local Rev. Farmer (played by Forest Whitaker) that “Education is the only way out!” reduces cinema—and Black American history—to a fortune cookie. It glosses over the culture of lynching and everyday terrorism, resorting to bigoted sheriff and redneck pig-farmer clichés. A viewer can only tolerate this banality by recalling stronger, more honest images of American race history like Intruder in the Dust, the lynch party-entertainment sequence of Terence Davies’ 1996 The Neon Bible or the scene of hillbilly deprivation in Kevin Costner’s 1994 The War where a subtler view traced American racism to class-based deprivation.
Here, each debate scene features calculated topics (welfare, integrated education, civil disobedience) that preach at the audience—an old-fashioned, condescending concept (entertainment pedagogy) that Oprah and Denzel mistake for genuine black expression. It’s self-congratulatory, black-bourgeois point-making like in a Spike Lee movie. And efforts at characterizing the debate students’ ambitions and sexuality are trite, especially after the complex personalities seen in Akeelah and the Bee and Pride. Those films were about community habit as much as self-reliant striving and their young protagonists learned from conflicted mentors, not the teacher-poet-labor-organizer-superhero Denzel portrays with his customary smugness.
Dramas like The Great Debaters are only superficially fact-based; they become demoralizing masquerades for Hollywood filmmakers afraid to imagine the spiritual lives of non-famous black people. That these biopics epitomize creative failure is evident in this film’s inability to relate the daily terror of lynch-culture living: The fact that black families talked about it, girded themselves against it, indoctrinated their children into its dangers is left out of The Great Debaters’ emotional deliberations. No surprise that media moguls Denzel and Oprah chose this approach, glorifying a trio of promising young public performers, because The Great Debaters is not actually concerned with lynching, or little-known history that you need to know. Like Hollywood’s typical black biopics, it’s really about showbiz.
