Friday, December 28, 2007

The Great Debaters


In college, I relished debate. After all, college was the best place for it. Those four years gave one time and space to hash out with others all those great ideas, to engage with those who saw the world differently from your own, to have your mind changed or not. But more important than anything, college was the time where you found your voice and figured out what you believed in. And if you didn't, well, at least you had a good enough time about which you could tell your children and grandchildren years from now.

I was reminded of those long-ago college years of mine as I watched Denzel Washington's The Great Debaters. I remembered that sweet thrill of both of hearing scintillating new ideas and seeing beautiful young ladies.

Yet, there's more here than fun college times in this movie. We are taken to Marshall, Texas, where on Wiley College, Denzel Washington's Melvin Tolson is trying to mold the young minds of black students in 1935, a time when Jim Crow segregation was at its height.

Washington's second directorial effort tells the mostly true story of Tolson's efforts to revive a debate team goes virtually undefeated and eventually beats a predominantly white college team. This is your typical root-for-the-underdog kind of movie, a Rocky where the weapons are words instead of fists.

What saves the movie from sinking into soggy sap is Washington's remarkable restraint. He has confidence in the power of the story that he doesn't need to be heavy-handed here.

And the performances he draws from his young actors (Jurnee Smollett, Denzel Whitaker and Nate Parker) are good. Nate Parker's Henry Lowe is a hot-headed womanizing drunk with a natural gift at debating. Denzel Whitaker plays James Farmer Jr., an awkward young man striving to find his own voice amid the thunderous one of his scholarly and authoritarian father, played by Forest Whitaker. (Note: This is the same James Farmer Jr. who eventually grows up to found the Congress of Racial Equality, one of the premier civil-rights organizations in this country). And Jurnee Smollett, who has grown into a striking young woman since her debut years ago in Eve's Bayou, plays Samantha Booke, who has dreams of being a lawyer. All of them have their various arcs in the story, each finding the power of their words.

And at the center is Melvin B. Tolson, a professor dedicated to helping his students find and keep their righteous minds. Tolson could have been your typical motivational teacher but Washington gives him a bit of complexity that makes him vastly more interesting and bit more unpredictable than what one might expect in a movie such as this.

Tolson's not only a professor and a poet but also a radical, spending his nights organizing sharecroppers and his days being a hard taskmaster to his students.

Washington manages to retain control of all these myriad elements and merge them into a compelling narrative.

And he lets us know in subtle but hard-to-forget ways that this is not the best time to be black. One of the most powerful scenes in this movie is when Tolson and his students encounter a lynching. It's a small haunting pause to a mostly uplifting movie. But Washington puts it there to remind the audience the harsh world in which these people live, that to be black was sometimes a tightrope between life and horrific death, that to survive was an accomplishment in and of itself.

But the other part of the story is that despite those obstacles, black people like Tolson and his students dared to achieve, to be great, to be young, gifted and black.

They, of course, win, this time against Harvard (though in real life, it was actually USC). We know the win is coming, but we forgive the predictability. We've been on their journey, and thus, the victory is oh, so sweet.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

I Am Legend


If by seeing I Am Legend you are hoping for a typical Hollywood blockbuster, you might slightly disappointed.

For the first two-thirds of this new Will Smith movie, there are no huge explosions, no smart-alecky hero spouting off cool one-liners. Instead, we see Will Smith barrelling down deserted Manhattan streets. Grass sprout from concrete, abandoned cars line the streets and Union Square Station sits empty. Quiet has replaced the usual noisy bustle of New York.

And Smith's Robert Neville is quite possibly the last man on earth. It has been this way for three years after a virus thought to cure cancer ended up wiping out much of humanity. All that's left are Neville and vampire-like zombies that roam the streets at night while Neville holes up with his dog, Sam, in his townhouse.

Like No Country for Old Men, this is a meditation wrapped in the framework of a thriller. Francis Lawrence, the director, gives you all the shocks to your system you'd expect from a sci-fi/monster movie.

But what's truly terrifying here is Neville's slow descent into paranoia, the disintegration of his sanity, as he continues to live day in and day out alone, his only companion being a dog.

Most of Neville's days are spent going after deer, sending out distress signals and working on a cure. At night, he quarantines himself in his house, sometimes sleeping in a bathtub with a rifle nearby, as the monsters play outside.

Will Smith has almost made a cottage industry of single-handedly saving the world, first in Independence Day and again in Men In Black, with a few cop-buddy films like Bad Boys thrown in for good measure. And in all of those movies, Smith gets by with a disarming charm and certain invincibility.

That's all gone in this movie. We see Smith vulnerable, afraid, just about to crack. His is a dark performance, similar in some ways to the one he crafted in The Pursuit of Happiness.

Yet, as he always does, he lets some light into the darkness, imbuing Neville with a likability that allows the audience to put up with him alone for long stretches of time.

It's only in the last half that the movie goes from meditative to action-packed, as the zombies move in. Unfortunately, the zombies never seen real, the CGI effects a little too obvious. And Lawrence packs the end of the movie with a heavy-handed spirituality that doesn't quite work.

Up until then, I Am Legend is a thrill ride and if you have to have someone be the last man on earth, you couldn't do worse than Will Smith.

Saturday, December 01, 2007

No Country for Old Men


In No Country for Old Men, the quiet haunts. All you hear is the bark of a dog, the rush of the river or the quick whoosh of an air gun.

The quiet haunts because that is when evil flourishes, when no one can hear it. The Coen brothers relish the quiet, make effective use of silence to make the horror more real.

And that horror is in the person of Anton Chigurh, possibly the most frightening villain ever placed on screen.

It is Javier Bardem's flat expression, piercing wide eyes and few spoken words that make Chigurh so bloodcurdling cold. He is a psychopath as brutally relentless as Halloween's Michael Meyers and as twistedly logical as Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs.

And in this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel, Chigurh is in pursuit of Llewelyn Moss, a loser of a welder who happens upon $2 million in drug money.

Moss takes the cash and soon starts running. But Chigurh is death personified, armed with an air gun and a hard-to-shake determination to catch his prey.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is the moral center of this tale. He is ready to retire when he hears of the mess that Moss has gotten himself into and he tries to help.

But even he knows that evil is inevitable and he has grown weary of the world he lives in, one that has gotten worse and not better the longer he breathes air.

The violence is bloody as Chigurh closes in on Moss, slaying anyone who gets in his way. But the violence isn't shocking. Instead, what turns your blood cold is the all-encompassing weight of the evil in the world.

It overwhelms everyone in its path. You can't escape it anymore than you can escape coin-tossing Chigurh.

Can evil ever be defeated, or do you at some point learn to live with it, carve out the little good you can find in this life? These are the questions In the Country of Old Men asks. They aren't easy questions, and the answers are as hard as the desolate land these characters live in.

The Coen brothers take you on a long, harsh journey where the ending isn't certain to be good. But with brilliant performances and breath-taking pacing, they have crafted a movie that stays with you.

It is the quiet haunts you, all the way down to your bones.