Judas and the Black Messiah was billed as one of the best movies of the year and it’s definitely a must-watch. Written by twin comedian brothers, Keith and Kenny Lucas, and directed by Shaka King, it twists and wends around the dirty cops, nefarious feds, and soaring ideals that led to the Black Panther Party’s meteoric rise.
There’s a long walk to get to where I’m going with this, but I think it’ll be more fun than me saying “this movie wasn’t made for me but,” and it’ll give a sense of the personal relationship I have with this movie. So here goes: I’m coming late to this party, but Wife and I just finished watching all of Community from start to finish (was my first time–we limited ourselves to at most two episodes a day, so this is an enterprise that started midsummer and only ended recently), and after we were done, I wanted to watch some of the spin off projects that the various actors in that show started. Gillian Jacobs’s Love on Netflix is one of my favorite comedy series. I binged Madmen a few years back (although, Glow is probably in my near-term future), but Atlanta was the show I was most interested in trying out next. Donald Glover’s stardom precedes him. I sometimes have grand plans to watch a major hit series before I travel to a place–I guess like if I had insisted in seeing Sleepless in Seattle before visiting Seattle or Breaking Bad before visiting Albuquerque or The Magicians, The Flash, and Man in the High Castle before going to Vancouver. The time came and went and I didn’t see the show before my trip.
(That trip, by the way, was excellent. I was there for work, but I went to a bunch of different BBQ places. I saw the Aquarium. I went to cute little independent bookstores. I saw The Survivalist (2015) at a cool indie theater in a year that was all about post-apocalyptic let downs and poison mushrooms. The weather was dry thunderstorms for a week, which I’m told is par for the course in Atlanta.)
Anyway, and I think we’re getting closer now to swinging this back toward JatBM, this is how I found Lakeith Stanfield, the breakout star of Sorry to Bother You and that romantic af movie trailer with Issa Rae from last year, The Photograph. Stanfield delivers his best lines under his breath as asides. He’s the torch bearer of absurdist humor in Atlanta, fulfilling the promise of a much more fully explored Troy-type character from Community.
In JatBM, he has glimmers of these comic elements, when he grins after a particularly convincing performance of anger or when he’s astounded by the arsenal of the Black Panthers or when he openly calls for Jessie Plemmons’s Oscar from within the movie. He is also riddled with doubt and guilt and long swaths of inarticulate dread. Daniel Kaluuya gives a commanding performance, one that the six Oscar nominations for this movie should’ve offered him lead, instead of a second supporting actor nom. One of the things that didn’t quite work for us was the age difference between Fred Hampton and Kaluuya. Fred Hampton was 22 years old when he was slain and Kaluuya is ten years older. The depiction might be accurate, but Kaluuya gives so much polish and confidence and gravitas to the role, in a way that doesn’t quite match the rough edges of youth.
The historicity of the movie generally does not bother me, although in Wife’s reading of some of the background behind this story, it appears there’s some discussion of the way in which the “Eyes of the Prize” documentary interview is misrepresented in the epilogue to the film, making it seem like Stanfield’s character committed suicide out of guilt upon watching himself, when that was not the case. NYT made reference to similarities in the way that JatBM and BlacKKKlansmen “punted” on political commentary of FBI surveillance of racial justice organizations. I don’t think that JatBM dodges or pulls punches. I actually like the way that the police constitute a spirit of vengeance like the Erinyes rather than trying to feel our their nuances. I think there’s some points at which the film’s reliance on biography leads it to fall into the “this is a thing that happened” structure of storytelling, rather than a cogent narrative arc.
The movie, Wife noticed, does a good job of inventing the Judy Harmon character (played by Dominique Thorne). The other women in the Black Panthers are either the mothers of slain Panthers love interests, as with the intense and captivating performance of Dominque Fishback’s Deborah Johnson. I had a chance to listen to some stories about the women from the BPP from one of the founding women of the Black Panthers the week after I saw this movie, strangely enough, (this is March now) Judy Juanita (whose book of poetry Virgin Soul, came out in 2013), and I kind of think that Deborah Johnson’s character may be in part based on Juanita, because of her connection to the Panther’s newspaper. Juanita said she hadn’t been consulted and hadn’t seen the movie, though, so maybe the connection is only aesthetic or coincidental. My takeaway from that talk is that the BPP was composed primarily of young people and largely women.
This is one of the photos that was shown at the talk to demonstrate the intergenerational aspects of the movement. The way in which women young and old took positions of power in the BPP and organized on behalf of the party. The Judy character, a militant with a hard edge, always present during the shootouts, the tense investigations and confrontations, makes for a more balanced depiction of the women involved, Wife says.
Overall, I’m interested in this movie mostly as an artifact for a number of young, promising actors who are expanding their range.
