the Great Debaters

While my high school never had a debate team (we did Mock Trials instead), when I got to college, I was surrounded by former debate team members. Being a theater major and not a musical theater major brought me close to a lot of public speaker and the like. I became interested in their stories and watching these people go back and forth. I believed I missed my calling, seeing as how much I love to debate. Instead I started to read all of the nonfiction books my friends had and eventually I read about a guy named Melvin Tolson. Tolson took an all black college team in debate in the 1930's all the way to the top and eventually facing U.S.C in a debate. It was an inspirational tale and now with Denzel directing and starring and Oprah producing and promoting it, the movie telling Tolson's tale has been made. Inspirational tales are a dime a dozen but some times they break through, would this be one of them?

Melvin B. Tolson(Washington) is a professor at Wiley college in Marshall, Texas. It is 1935 and segregation is very much alive. Tolson teaches literature and spouts off the poems of Harlem poets and preaches about how things are in the North. He is also the debate coach and soon he has a team of debaters comprised of Hamilton Burgess (Jermaine Williams) Henry Lowe(Nate Parker) Samantha Booke(Jurnee Smollett) and the 14 year old James Farmer Jr.(Denzel Whitaker). Farmer Jr. has a lot to live up too as his father James Farmer(Forest Whitaker) is one of 5 black people with a PhD and his father speaks 7 languages. Burgess is the only seasoned debater, but Lowe is a literary genius, able to pull quotes from great works of fiction and nonfiction and Booke is a fierce and passionate speaker. The team starts racking up win upon win and Tolson begins sending letters to all kinds of white schools and eventually a white school gives them an opportunity to debate but Burgess feels too much pressure at the possibility of being killed and so Booke takes his spot in the starting line up. On the side, Tolson is trying to form a union amongst the lowly farmhands, white and black and he is causing issues with the sheriff and is eventually arrested and unable to leave the state when the call from Harvard(in real life it was USC but here it is Harvard) comes down.

I will try to keep my soapboxing to a minimum here, but African American struggles have always fascinated me and I may not be able to stay away from my soap box. The plot of the movie is obvious and there is never any real doubt where it is going, but the story of this movie is so important and handled so delicately that I could not help but fall in love. In a time where African Americans are typically portrayed with guns and bling and all that other nonsense, here comes a movie about bright young people challenging the social standards of the day. It makes me sick that this was happening less than 80 year ago. There is a scene involving a lynching that haunts me two day later. Denzel Washington is not a perfect director, as he has a habit of letting a scene go on a bit long, but when it comes to making a point or inspiring he really nails it. We only see the most important debates and hear only the important arguments and the final debate is truly spectacular to watch. We see the three remaining team members grow in front of our eyes, flushing out fully realized characters. Denzel Whitaker gets the most screen time with Forest and Denzel and he does a pretty good job of holding his own with two African American legends, two acting legends. I am not new to the Forest Whitaker band wagon either; I have always championed him. Though they only have one scene together, watching Washington and Whitaker on screen together in that scene is a treasure as both actors are top notch and that scene bristles with excitement. Even later when they just share a look, volumes are spoken in those looks.

The idea of words being able to change the world is an idea I have always thought fondly of and this movie sets out to prove it can happen. These young people started by beating the best all black colleges but were not content to stop there. Their words got them to Harvard. Their words took them to the top and their arguments made them winners to their communities, their families and to each other. The movie may go on a bit long at times and the white characters don't get much to do, but it is all forgiven when Denzel shoots scenes of racial tension with such delicate grace. A scene involving Forest Whitaker hitting a white person's pig is a perfect sign of how things were as essentially the most articulate black minds of the time has to resort to "Yes sir" and all other sorts of embarrassing things but as he mentions to his son. "Sometimes we do what we have to do to be able to do what we want to do." Any movie that has the spirit of Langston Hughes kind of gets a free pass for whatever flaws it may have. Any movie that wants to use words to change things and instills faith and hope and can move me to tears from the power of the message is clearly a winning movie.

I watch a lot of underdog stories and I watch a lot of inspirational movies and while this one has most of the trappings of a cliche inspirational movie- the different bigger ending, endless trials, inner turmoil- it manages to inspire more than a majority of them do. To show how important this movie is, it is the first movie ever to star two African American men who have won The Oscar for Best Actor. Elder African American people believe this is a story that needs to be told and while it isn't the exact depiction of what actually happened, the mark of a good movie is not how closely it follows the truth, but how it works in entertaining or educating or in the case of this movie, inspiring. However, what the movie does leave out is that even though the school was victorious over USC, the win was not recognized by the national debate standards because blacks were not allowed to be recognized for such feats. The Wiley team went on to have ten undefeated seasons which is impressive for sports or anything else for that matter.

Final Grade: A-