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Reviews of movies

March to End Injustice

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On this weekend of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, my wife and I spent last night watching the movie Selma before going out to dinner. Produced by Oprah Winfrey, who also plays the part a Selma protester, the movie focuses on Dr. King’s leadership of the March from Selma to Montgomery for black voting rights in Alabama, which resulted in 1965 in the passage by Congress of the Voting Rights Act that effectively ended the devious practices of southern officials in denying voting rights to black citizens. \

It is an uplifting movie, as one would expect, and I highly recommend it. The movie deserves more than the two Oscar nominations it received, but getting justice in Hollywood has always been a curious game of inside politics. It is not worth probing further in this forum.

Like most movies about a key piece of history, one gets far more out of the movie by knowing something about the events it portrays before watching it. The movie, however, rises above such demands to deliver a powerful message about the realities of segregation and the uncountable ways in which it was designed to crush the human soul. Early in the movie, Oprah’s character, having filled out a voter registration form, goes to the county registrar in Selma to register. The officious clerk first asks if her boss knows she is coming to the courthouse to “create the fuss.”

“No fuss,” she replies, “I just want to register to vote.”

He then asks her about the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, which she recites perfectly. Determined to find a reason to deny her, he then asks how many county judges there are in Alabama. Sixty-nine, she says, and he grimaces. “Name them,” he says, and when she cannot, he stamps DENIED on her application. She leaves, knowing that further discussion is futile. The only thing that will change the outcome, she realizes, is peaceful protest.

I won’t go into great detail about what follows; go see the movie, please. Suffice it to say that, when the protesters in the first attempted march attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, local sheriff Jim Clark orders them to disperse in two minutes or face the consequences. They stand firm, and in short order, officers are flailing away at protesters with billy clubs, splitting skulls and breaking bones. Others on horses chase them down on the way back across the bridge, in one case letting a whip fly. All this is based on the striking reality of the brutality of Clark’s deputies in the historic march.

What anyone with an ounce of decency must wonder, however, even with the hindsight of history, is what motivates the kind of hatred and fear that causes men in uniform to unleash such violence against unarmed protesters seeking one of the most basic human rights in the world? How does anyone develop such animus against fellow human beings? I can almost understand simple cowardice in not confronting such people, but I find it impossible to understand the actual perpetrators of such injustice. For the life of me, I have never understood how any of them could reconcile such behavior with the Bible Belt Christianity they claimed to profess—especially given that Christianity was at the root of Dr. King’s movement.

But the movie is about more than that. It is also about the epic struggle of King, played by David Oyelowo, to motivate President Lyndon B. Johnson to accelerate plans to introduce voting rights legislation at the federal level. There has been a debate about whether the movie fairly portrays Johnson, though it is clear from all historical records that he was a master political manipulator who may well have resented what he saw as his own manipulation by this then 36-year-old Negro preacher. In the end, however, Johnson, who had only the previous fall won the Oval Office in a landslide of epic proportions, was not going to be left behind by the tide of history.

To forestall action by Johnson, amid legal battles over the rights of the protesters to march in Alabama, Gov. George Wallace visits the White House. There ensues what I regard as one of the most intriguing, and surely accurate, scenes in the movie involving Johnson, who asks Wallace why he is “doing this,” that is, using the powers of the state to prevent blacks from voting. Wallace pretends that he has no authority over the county registrars who are preventing blacks from voting, and Johnson is blindingly blunt and direct: “Are you shittin’ me? Are you shitting the President of the United States?” He asks what people in 1985 (not to mention 2015) will think of the stances they took in 1965, but Wallace professes not to care. Johnson ends the conversation simply: “I don’t intend to go down in history alongside the likes of you.”

In the end, as we all know, he not only did the right thing, but by November 1965, with King at his side, signed a landmark law with strict enforcement provisions that permanently changed the political landscape of America. Those who died at the hands of racist murderers, and those whose skulls were cracked and bones were fractured by merciless Alabama troopers and police, had something to show for their courageous sacrifice.

As I said, just go see the movie. If you think of yourself as a brave individual, match your courage against that of those who marched. You may find yourself aspiring to do better. I did.

Jim Schwab

We Shall Overcome Together

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Imagine watching a mean-spirited white farmer shoot your father dead in the cotton fields shortly after taking advantage of your mother in the shed. Then imagine, after several years of serving as a household servant, walking away into a world unknown, with few possessions, and walking past two black men hanging from nooses on a public street in Georgia. And somehow you first find a job serving affluent white people and ignoring their comments, and then finding your way to a fancy hotel in Washington, D.C., on the recommendation of your boss, who turned down the opportunity, and after several years finding that your performance leads you to the White House to serve as a new butler. By now it is 1957, Dwight Eisenhower is president, and you are a witness to history as he sends federal troops to Arkansas to enforce desegregation of public schools.

That is only the beginning of the story in Lee Daniels’ The Butler, the movie my wife and I saw at the theater last night. The violence, however, is not at all gratuitous but instructive about a piece of American history that many would still prefer to forget or ignore. Cecil Gaines served under presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan, and lived long enough to see the inauguration of Barack Obama. His wife, played by Oprah Winfrey, lived almost but not quite long enough. Along the way, they witnessed the assassination of John Kennedy and watched their oldest son, Louis, attend Fisk University in Nashville, where he joined the Freedom Riders—against his father’s wishes—survived numerous encounters with the law before the law finally changed, and suffered the death of their younger son, Charles, in Vietnam. He was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery, at a time when Cecil and Louis were estranged as a result of Louis’s involvement in the Black Panthers. Louis eventually returned to school, earned a Master’s degree in political science, ran for Congress, and led protests against apartheid in South Africa. His father finally reconciled with him at that time after retiring from his job during the administration of Ronald Reagan, who opposed sanctions against the South African regime. The movie depicts Reagan, as Cecil announced his retirement, wondering whether he was on the wrong side of history with regard to civil rights. As ever, Gaines tried to avoid answering the question. But he proceeded to reconcile with Louis by joining his protest.

Although the pace of such a biopic is sometimes uneven, as would be the case with most movies whose story stretches over nine decades, it is nonetheless an extremely worthwhile contribution to public understanding of where our nation has been with regard to race relations, and how far it has come, and more importantly, how it got from point A to point B. It shows that division of opinion and perspective was every bit as alive and poignant in black as in white America over those many years. We watch presidents and others change their hearts and minds as a result of experience. It is important, in 2013, to remember that awareness of the full range of the American experience was not as prevalent a century ago as now, that we have not always had 24-hour news, whatever that has contributed, and that for many blacks in the Old South, leaving home was a frightening experience because their world had been so narrow. It took real fear and despair to push people northward.

But the sight of those hanging men, the vicious responses to lunch counter sit-ins, and the burning of freedom buses by robed Klansmen helped provide that impetus, along with the sense that there had to be new opportunities elsewhere. But the violence also has long troubled me in another sense.

As a Christian, I have never, ever found it possible to reconcile such behavior by the southern white community with the so-called Bible Belt affinity for religion. I grew up in Ohio, with some distance from the Old South, but I knew of it even as a teenager, watching television news footage of civil rights protests in Alabama and Mississippi. It just did not add up. I am well aware of the tendency to accept the way things are, and tradition and the status quo are not always bad things. But the sheer brutality required to enforce segregation cannot be reconciled with the teachings of Jesus no matter how hard one tries, no matter how desperately one wants to believe in his own privileges in an oppressive system. There is a willful stubbornness about clinging to such beliefs in the face of all the evidence of their unfairness. I am well aware that these things were not limited to the South, though the lynchings largely were.

The reconciliation of father and son in The Butler is the reconciliation of two very different paths to personal and political liberation, and the discovery that Cecil and Louis, coming from two different times and generations, had more in common in the end than either realized during most of their long estrangement. Their conflict is a reminder to us all of the stress imposed on all of us who struggle to find a path to a better world. Both made meaningful contributions, and both were heroes, each in his own way. If this movie has a core lesson to impart, I believe that is it.

Jim Schwab

42: Baseball in Transition

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Until this past year, I had served for several years in a row as a biography judge for the Society of Midland Authors’ annual book awards. As a result, a few years ago, I read Judith Testa’s Sal Maglie: Baseball’s Demon Barber (Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), which won that award. At the time, I commented to a friend that a good sports biography can serve as a window into an era. One learns about how a player grew up, how the sport groomed its stars, and about the ethos of the cities they played for. Some of the background information such books can supply may be harder to convey in movies, but I believe 42 has come as close as any sports movie to detailing the nuances of significant change in an era when baseball changed forever for the better, abandoning a racist whites-only roster of days past and introducing the first black player in Major League Baseball, Jackie Robinson. Much has been written about Robinson over the years, but a movie can reach people in very different ways.

Among those different ways are the facial expressions—the hateful stares, the condescending sneers–of the actors portraying the skeptics and race-baiters who inhabited baseball at the time, including umpires, managers, and fellow ballplayers, as well as the images of those who were more welcoming and open-minded. Among the latter was Pee Wee Reese, the Dodger shortstop, who hailed from Kentucky. At a game in Cincinnati, Reese embraces Robinson as a way of “telling my relatives who I am.”

At an earlier point, however, after Robinson, still a minor league player for the Montreal Royals in the Brooklyn Dodgers farm system, and undergoing spring training in Florida, has been threatened by local roughnecks, one man approaches him on the sidewalk. Robinson is with his wife, who is pushing their first baby in a stroller.

“I want to say something to you,” the man says, and we all get ready for the predictable.

“What is that?” Robinson asks, bracing himself for yet another racial slur or barely veiled threat.

The man says that he is not alone in pulling for Robinson, that there are others, and he and his friends believe that, “if a man’s got the goods,” he ought to get a fair shake. Visibly relieved, Robinson thanks someone who had seemed menacing less than a minute before. Life was like that for Robinson. He never knew entirely what to expect. Pitchers from other teams aimed for his head; on one occasion, he was beaned. Philadelphia manager Ben Chapman (played by Alan Tudyk) shouted slur after slur from the sidelines until the Phillies’ management insisted that he apologize publicly to spare his team further embarrassment in the press. Challenged by Robinson teammate Pee Wee Reese in a heated argument, Chapman yells as Reese retreats to the dugout, “How does it feel to be a nigger’s nigger?” Reese replies across the field, “I don’t know. How does it feel to be a redneck piece of shit?” Yet, after the game, as the press is interviewing him, Chapman insists it is no different and no more hurtful than the ethnic slurs he has hurled in the past at Hank Greenberg (Jewish) and Joe DiMaggio (Italian). Yep, all in good, clean fun.

So much fun that Robinson ducks into the hallway behind the dugout and nearly retches, knowing that he cannot yell back or fight back, lest he trigger the perception that he cannot handle it. Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, played marvelously by Harrison Ford, comes back to support him, man to man. Robinson, often baffled (though grateful) as to why Rickey has brought him into this maelstrom, protests, “You don’t know what it’s like.” Rickey answers honestly: “You’re right, I don’t,” before offering further encouragement and finally asking, as the inning is ending, “Who’s going to play first?” Robinson, a consummate professional, puts on his glove and resumes the game.

Why did Rickey break the ice and take the chance? Already an older man by 1946, when he made the decision and chose Robinson as the pioneer, not well supported even by his own team staff, Rickey notes wryly in an early scene that “Robinson is a Methodist. I’m a Methodist. God is a Methodist.”  My wife, who grew up Methodist in Nebraska, whose grandfather was a Methodist preacher, loved that line. It not only humanized the relationship between the two men but revealed an underlying strain of faith that helped guide both toward the moral fortitude it took to ride out the 1947 season in which the Dodgers introduced Robinson to the majors—a season in which he challenged numerous stereotypes and virtually carried the team on his back, at times, into the World Series despite numerous obstacles. It is not as if Robinson is superhuman, though that word gets used in the movie at times. He is a gentleman, unlike his adversaries, who is able to rein in his temper for a greater purpose.

42, in the end, is only incidentally a movie about baseball. It is much more a movie about courage and human dignity, and the challenges we all may face when the ugly side of human behavior threatens to undermine the glory of human achievement. I highly recommend it.

Jim Schwab