Movie Review - 'The Great Debaters'

The Great Debaters

Starring Denzel Washington, Forrest Whitaker and Jurnee Smollett
Directed by Denzel Washington
Rated PG-13

Though he's long been held up as a standard for American film actors, Denzel Washington has, in two successive films separated by half a decade, established himself as an immensely gifted populist director. Though you shouldn't expect Washington to make David Lynch movies, he does manage to extract every little bit of humanity out of his stories and characters.

Antwone Fisher was a mostly solid movie until Derek Luke, in the starring role, delivered a stirring poem that took the wind out of you. It was as if Washington was lulling you to sleep in anticipation of this big finish.

He does it again with The Great Debaters, which never drops the ball and scores a couple late touchdowns that will stick with you for a long, long time.

In rural Texas in the mid-1930s, a debate team at an all-black college dared to go outside their station, engaging white schools in spirited debates on the topics of the day. It was simply not done at the time, as hard as it may be for some of us to grasp seventy years later. They were led and spurred by Mel Tolson (Washington), a fiery, intelligent man of the people who fought injustice at many turns.

His young and inexperienced team (Nate Parker, Jurnee Smollett, and Denzel Whitaker who is not related to Forrest Whitaker, playing his father here) had to believe in themselves in ways that they had no reason to, given the racial inequity at the time, particularly in the south. And it would be easy for Washington or any director to let those tensions run the show and even at that, The Great Debaters could have succeeded.

Washington, though, believes his characters and his young actors are more valuable and that they, not the strife of the time, deserve and can earn center stage. They do not disappoint. Smollett in particular stands out, wrapping the pain of being an African American who's easily on par with any of her opponents around the brewing hate of being perceived inferior just for being a woman.

So Washington is to be applauded for telling this story this way. There are things we expect and a few things we don't in The Great Debaters. Somehow he makes those things we don't expect the ones we cling on to in the end.