Oh Cinema: Films for the Trump Years, Part 17: Malcolm X

I don't know why, but for some reason a 2017 article by film critic Odie Henderson popped up on my Twitter feed on the 25^th anniversary of the release of Spike Lee's Malcolm X, his massive, three-plus-hour biopic of one of the most titanic figures in 20th-century American history. At first, I was confused as to why this article was just crossing my path now, but the time gap between now and the article's original publication is ultimately trivial; the whole gist of Henderson's piece is to point out how revisiting the film several decades later throws into painful relief how very, very little has changed in America in terms of racial inequality since, not just the release of the film itself, but the life of its subject. And if that was already undoubtedly true in 2017, it's even more obvious now.

As it happens, while I am writing this article in late May 2020, a viral video has ended up launching the largest public reckoning with racism and our militarized police force since Ferguson. The video is- God have mercy on us all- yet another example of a police officer callously and cruelly murdering a black man named George Floyd over....what? Speeding? A parking ticket? Frankly, it doesn't matter. Events have moved extremely rapidly over the course of me writing this, so any summary I try to put here will be long out of date by the time you're reading it, so please; get active and start informing yourself.

And this is happening across the backdrop of an ongoing global pandemic, one that has, so far, hit the United States the hardest in terms of the numbers of cases and deaths. This horrific burden has been overwhelmingly born by the poorer and less-well-off among us, which, inevitably, means minorities and marginalized communities. African-Americans, Native Americans, illegal immigrants, and the inmates of federal prisons (which, again, overwhelmingly means black and brown persons) have been the most devastated communities so far, and with the Trump administration adamantly refusing to do any of the heavy lifting necessary to stave off social and economic collapse, this is not about to get better anytime soon. As always, real tragedy tears off all the masks, and an increasing number of Republicans, conservatives, and white people in general have taken to saying the quiet part very, very loudly.

So, once again, those who want to comprehend why this sort of shit remains so deeply embedded in American DNA need to seriously grapple with our history of inequality, genocide, and discrimination of every shade and stripe imaginable. I've already recommended films on the US prison complex and other aspects of American racism, including an MLK biopic, but reading Henderson's piece made me realize any attempt to encompass the history of American racism without including Malcolm X would be incomplete at best.

Fortunately, much like Ava DuVernay's Selma, Malcolm X is of a much different cut than your standard biopic. The genre of prestige biographical films has a rather justified reputation for usually being incredibly safe, dry, predictable, and rote on a filmmaking and storytelling level, even if a rote and formulaic approach is wholly antithetical to the person or persons the film is trying to depict (see the latest sludge bomb Bohemian Rhapsody for a primo example of this- or rather, don't).

Spike Lee is having none of that here. The film opens with an American flag slowly burning into a giant X, intercut with shots from the Rodney King beating that took place roughly a year before the film's release. Subtle, this movie is not.

Perhaps the first thing that struck me as the film proper started up after the opening credit sequence was just how vivid and vibrant the colors of its world are. Particularly in the first segment of the film, when a young Malcolm X (or, as he then styled himself, "Detroit Red") is not much more than a party-boy and hustler in the big city. There is so much texture and lushness to each frame, I literally felt like I'd been pulled straight through a time warp to late-1940's Harlem. While the use of color and lighting alters later on, reflecting the various mental and physical changes Malcolm X undergoes in his short life, that almost tactile sense remains throughout. This is very much of a piece with Spike Lee's other work, of course; Do The Right Thing, a movie where a heat wave plays a crucial role in the plot, nearly had me sweating buckets by the end, even though I watched it in the relative coolness of early March.

Remarkably inventive uses of sound design, camerawork, and editing aboud throughout to jar the viewer just a little out of any complacency they might be tempted to slip into; Malcolm and his erstwhile partner-in-crime, Shorty (played by Spike Lee himself), goofing around in a park shooting finger-guns at each other, seem to cause the sound of actual gunfire to ring out, and Malcolm falls to the ground, appearing to be dead. A sequence of him in solitary confinement later on flips the camera on its head, something we don't know until the lone window to the world of light opens up, casting its white glare on the outline of Malcolm's upside-down face. And in my favorite bit of the entire film, an early scene where Malcolm is working as a train waiter and has to endure the smarmy superiority of white passengers, a flash-edit convinces you that he actually does snap and mash a lemon meringue pie into a man's face. Alas, it was just a momentary flight of fancy on Malcom's part, played out on-screen for our benefit. He knew what the price would have been if he'd actually done it.

The central anchor of the film, of course, is Denzel Washington, and I don't think I would dare argue with anyone who contends this to be the defining performance in his career. It also ended up being one of the more infamous snubs in Oscar history; the winner that year was Al Pacino for....actually, I don't think anyone remembers what he did.

As amazingly as Washington threads the lines between the many parts of Malcolm X over the course of nearly 20 years of his life is, I found the balance brought by his wife, played by Angela Bassett, to be just as important to allowing the film to engage with the complex disparaties between the different phases of Malcolm's spiritual and intellectual development. Next to his conversion in prison to Islam, the revelations about its founder that led him to eventually break away from the Nation of Islam was one of the most consequential moments of his life, and not just because it was what directly led to his murder. While I am a little unsure how historically accurate it is, in the film it's Bassett who forces Malcolm to reckon with this dark side of the movement he'd devoted himself heart and soul. It's the woman in his life who forces him to stop working so obsessively, to think critically for the first time about the people around him, a moment of introspection that sets up the next stage of his journey. In fact, f I had one, tiny criticism of the film, it's that, it's running time notwithstanding, it could have used even more Angela Bassett; I have never seen another movie make a simple, short phone call feel so profoundly romantic.

Malcom X is a titanic achievement in biopic filmmaking, a gripping and incredibly challenging examination of a life every bit as layered, complex, frustrating, and inspiring as Martin Luther King Jr's. As history repeats itself once again, and America engages in another tug-of-war over whether or not we will continue to ignore the sins and legacies of our past, it is incumbent on all people of good faith to educate themselves on the struggles of those who've gone before. Otherwise, we stand absolutely zero chance of making the most of this latest opportunity for healing, condemning us to continue on our old cycle of racial prejudice, violence, and forgetfulness.

Previously on Films for the Trump Years:

Part 1- Selma

Part 2- Good Night, and Good Luck

Part 3- 13th

Part 4- Get Out

Part 5- Chasing Ice/Chasing Coral

Part 6- The Big Short

Part 7- Human Flow

Part 8- Moonlight/Winter's Bone

Part 9- Black Panther

Part 10- Arrested Development

Part 11- Bowling for Columbine