Sunday, January 20, 2008

The Great Debaters


Starring and directed by Denzel Washington, "The Great Debaters" is based on the true story of an underdog debate team from a small, black college that wins a national championship in the segregated 1930's.
The debate team is from tiny Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. The debate coach is Melvin Tolson (Washington), who demands the highest performance from his students. Tolson is something of an enigma. He has a secret life as a political organizer; he is trying to unionize the poor whites and blacks. This has major plot ramifications, even though he keeps his political views out of the classroom and the debates themselves.
Each of the debates we see in the movie are on social justice themes. The first major engagement Wiley College had against an "Anglo Saxon" college was on the subject of "Civil Disobedience," for example. The Wiley debaters always got the desirable position; they never had to debate in favor of something distasteful. It would have been interesting to see them forced to take the difficult position "Resolved: Civil Disobedience is Immoral."
The emotional climax of the film comes when the team is on a road trip to a debate and they come upon a lynch mob. As black people in the south in the 1930's, every day life for them was full of racism, but this event changed each of them. Each of the debates that followed this horrible scene drew on it, in ways both subtle and sledge-hammerlike.
On one level, the movie is your basic "sports movie" about a team that overcomes great adversity with a great coach and goes on to beat the big bad team to win the big championship. I'm not a fan of those movies because they're so predictable. This movie has that basic plot, but it's only the coathanger upon which the important stuff hangs. "The Great Debaters" is really about how education and self-respect are the keys to defeating racism and discrimination.
My only negative on this movie is that it was a bit overly long and a little preachy.
B+

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Why do I not see Rock of Love 2 under your tv worth watching list? Shame, shame, shame...