Review of Great Debaters

Washington's Second Pic As Helmer Misfires Greatly

Denzel Washington is one of those actors (we call them stars) who is a performative relative of the director-as-auteur; that is to say, his performances are continually self-referential and share common traits. Denzel Washington doesn't play characters; he plays himself. The Great Debaters, the second film that he has directed, is slightly more than a vehicle for himself. Slightly. The film's storyline is a formulaic retread of the typical mentor-coaches-ragtag-team-over-obstacles-to-victory genre film. This time, the setting is Wiley College, a school in rural Texas. The time, 1935. The obstacles? Racism/prejudice. The sport? Debating. It's semi-interesting to see, in these films, how much of the content is given to the film's actual narrative and how much is given to the sport-within-the-film. In the worst films in the genre, the sport within can be shown so much that it overpowers the rest of the picture. The Great Debaters is unique insofar as debate is hardly as visceral an activity as, say, football (Denzel has trolled this territory before, in Remember The Titans). At times, the film makes the mistake of attempting to have significant content/themes "dealt with" in the debates themselves; this is problematic because the discourse in the debates never goes deeper than the surface platitudes one might expect in such a film. Over the course of the film, there are various significant set pieces that are as gratuitous and manipulative as they are disturbing. Seeing as how the film is set against (and blatantly about) the racist climate in the pre-civil rights south, there is an encounter between James Farmer (a university professor, played by Forest Whitaker) and a bunch of rednecks who essentially rob him; a lynching that serves as a deus ex machina of sorts; and various other smaller encounters. The racial content is represented too directly, unoriginally, and context-less to have any impact beyond the superficial and immediate. The debate team storyline fails to really engage; it's as predictable as it is formulaic. There's a rivalry, a romance, a falling-out, and a final triumph against the seemingly unbeatable odds. The subplot involving Professor Tolson (that's Denzel, by the way) and the sharecropper's union he is attempting to create is the only element even remotely out of the ordinary in this territory, and one imagines that this was included for a cop-raid set piece and an attempt at historical accuracy more than anything else. The film's performances are unremarkable, with the exception of Forest Whitaker's, who provides one sliver of entertainment in this otherwise listless film. Whitaker, as Professor Farmer, plays a man of principle who seems far more deserving of his own film than Tolson. In every way that Whitaker's performance is mannered, subtle, yet terribly commanding, Washington's is overwrought, sentimental and obvious. It's one of the worst performances this critic has seen in quite some time. Mr. Washington has given some fantastic performances in the past - perhaps the distant past - and his acting under his own direction seems to have been done on autopilot. The film is another example of a half-cooked Hollywood attempt to deal with a serious subject, a subject worthwhile of being turned into a well-made film. The Great Debaters is not that film.

Posted on 12/16/07 by: ZacharyWigon 11:16 PM