Red Tails (2012) Review

rating: ****

the story: Tuskegee airmen perform heroics during WWII.

review: Until Top Gun: Maverick exploded at the box office last year, I was, like many other filmgoers, overlooking one of the original joys of Star Wars: the X-Wing run down the Death Star trench.  It's easy to forget the appeal of the sequence when the focus so often shifts to the world-building, the characters, the tension of the moment, but really, it's a holdover of the fighter pilot era best defined by WWII, and by the release of the original Top Gun, fast receding into the past.  Incredibly, George Lucas never featured that exact kind of storytelling again, until Red Tails, which he developed much earlier than its release date suggests, but kept getting turned down by studios (yes, even though it came from George Lucas), he contends, because it features an almost entirely black cast.

Lucas himself doesn't direct Tails, though by all accounts of his filmmaking career it's extremely difficult to imagine he stayed far behind during production (he's credited with direct involvement only during reshoots).  In effect this was his big goodbye to the world of film, before Disney kicked off the new Star Wars era without him.  The whole thing is basically one long excuse to immerse deeply into the dog-fighting Luke Skywalker experiences for just one moment in 1977, though its grounding in the all-black squadron history subsequently unearthed is probably far more personal to Lucas than it might be supposed, given his childhood memories of the black community around him and the black woman he married later in life.  Star Wars fans who always complained there wasn't enough black representation in the saga would have you believe otherwise, but Lucas himself never had a problem with black people.

The actors in Tails would be a highlight in any film, and by this point had been, including Cuba Gooding, Jr., whose breakthrough performance in Jerry Maguire was a tough act to follow, and basically he tried everything and never found traction.  He's joined by Terrence Howard, one of the modern era's great actors, frequently sabotaged by the reputation of being difficult to work with.  Howard appears in a very similar movie, Hart's War, which covers a sequence omitted in Tails of what happens to a black soldier in German captivity.  They're surrounded by an embarrassment of riches, including Leslie Odom, Jr. (later associated with Hamilton), Michael B. Jordan, Nate Parker (whose Birth of a Nation was crippled by allegations made against him), and David Oyelowo, whose least rewarding performance, to date, for me anyway, was MLK in Selma.  Otherwise, as Tails again proves, he's an overlooked treasure, easily the star just below Howard and Gooding of the movie.

The politics of what films gain recognition are so byzantine it's sometimes impossible to navigate, but something like Red Tails is worth the effort to discover.

Selma (2014)

rating: ***

the story: Martin Luther King Jr. prepares his historic march for voting rights in Alabama.

what it's all about: I think in hindsight, Selma is where the culture truly started to fracture.  Selma is far more about the budding Black Lives Matter movement, the politicization of it, than MLK's march.  It's somewhat clear that that's the whole reason the movie was made at all, and why critics lined up to state how great and timely it was.  To state this is not to say BLM is meritless, but to say that as a matter of civil discourse, such a cultural response to a film, and the cultural divide it helped spark, is far more damaging than anything MLK confronted, and is in fact why BLM exists at all, why MLK's actions seem to have amounted to nothing but an annual holiday.  It doesn't even seem to matter that the march spurred exactly the results MLK wanted.  For committed activists, results don't matter.  For such people, it becomes about social revolt. 

Ironically, there's a moment in Selma where Malcolm X, shortly before his assassination, has finally stepped from out of the shadow of such reasoning, and MLK struggles to believe it. 

No, Selma is not worth the hype.  It's worth a look as a glimpse, of the times it reflects, even as a reflection of the times in which it was made.  But it is not good filmmaking.  MLK himself is not even the central figure.  The central figure of this movie is simmering rage, which again, reflects not the story itself but what director Ava DuVernay is really talking about, in intentionally incendiary ways.  It's a tone poem, of sorts, to further stoke the flames of social division.  And not much more.

The worst thing about it is the second-most lauded thing about it, the performance of David Oyelowo as MLK.  If this had been a movie about Frederick Douglass, there wouldn't be much of a problem with his performance.  Douglass has been lost to history as a person.  As a champion of black rights, he remains as well-known as he ever was, but all we have are photographs.  This was long before the advent of film, of recorded voices.  But the same is not true of MLK.  Everyone who knows MLK knows what he sounded like.  We certainly know what he looked like.  DuVernay chose an actor who looks nothing like MLK, and who chose to sound nothing like MLK.  He may turn in a competent performance, but Oyelowo seems to have chosen to dismiss the source material as much as DuVernay herself.  These are two fundamental strikes against the quality of the production. 

Tom Wilkinson, Tim Roth, they both turn in Tom Wilkinson and Tim Roth performances, as Lyndon Johnson and George Wallace, respectively.  What I mean is, they look and sound like Tom Wilkinson and Tim Roth.  It's a pattern.  DuVernay has no interest at all in anything but her metaphor.  Wilkinson is Wilkinson as Benjamin Franklin, too, in John Adams, but again, it doesn't matter as much in John Adams, because we definitely retain no cultural memory of Benjamin Franklin as a person.  LBJ, meanwhile, was certainly a Texan, and by most accounts a lot like Trump, with a lot more sympathetic coverage, an abrasive personality.  But yeah, with a Texas accent.  Which Wilkinson does not give LBJ. 

And yet, DuVernay, and Oyelowo, and Selma itself were almost uniformly called great.  How again?

There's very little art to it at all.  The movie begins with MLK already declared a cultural hero.  There's token reference to his personal failings, but mostly to represent his struggle with LBJ.  The only real complaints about the film are in fact about LBJ, how DuVernay depicts him almost exclusively as a villain.  Although really, his actions are little different than Lincoln's leading up to the Emancipation Proclamation, even as depicted.  It may be worth noting that Douglass eventually decided Lincoln was less the hero than history has since decided.  The first demagogue lost for perspective in this struggle, perhaps.

Oprah Winfrey appears as a token representative of the struggle MLK is working against, voting rights.  She's depicted saintly, of course, until the movie thinks it can get away with her lashing out.  About the one performance that's just about what it needs to be comes from Cuba Gooding Jr., once (and once) a critical darling.  He appears as a lawyer.  If Selma is so tepid about actually featuring MLK, it could easily have given Gooding an expanded role.

The biggest irony of all this is that none of this, in any other context, would merit such a harsh review.  If this had been made, say, in the early '90s, like Spike Lee's far superior Malcolm X, it might be different.  Although there was considerable civil unrest then, too, it hadn't yet been politicized, turned into a permanent wedge in society.  There was still a chance, even with the once militant figure in Lee's movie, to look for common ground, a positive rallying point.  Films had come a long way from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the tepid Sidney Poitier breakthrough icebreaker in which a black man merely asks to be accepted by a single family.  Now we get a satire like Get Out, in the current climate.  Coincidence? 

Of course, if it had been made then, it would've been for TV, and been little noted.

There are better movies to try and heal old wounds with.  But now we seem to get only ones that want to rub salt into them.  Selma, alas, the first movie to significantly feature MLK, is one of them.  Never really thought I'd see the day.  Much less with Martin Luther King Jr., of all people. 

As a reflection of the times in which it was made, Selma is a useful mirror.  As filmmaking, it's junk.