‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ should win Best Picture. Here’s why:
This awards season the movie industry can anoint a hollow imitation or the genuine article.
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Judas and the Black Messiah should win the Academy Award for Best Picture. It’s as simple as that.
Director Shaka King’s sidedoor biopic of the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton is powerful, both in what it is and what it represents. That second qualifier in particular is important, because the Oscars have always valued narrative over merit, and the movie upon which the Academy bestows its highest honor is held up as the shining symbol to represent the entire industry over the past year.
It’s fair to look at the whole awards complex as masturbatory, but if the industry is going to pretend to be self-righteous for a night the Academy couldn’t do much better than this celebration of black empowerment, following the summer of George Floyd-inspired reckoning.
Still, the list of movies over the past year attempting to make grand statements about race relations in this country is long. The reason why this movie earns the mantle is because it trojan-horses its big ideas into a genuine thriller, prioritizing plot over politics, story over statement.
That could be seen, cynically, as a concession. One might claim that the cat and mouse chase, the gun fights and the antagonizing of a black Judas over the white authorities who controlled him are all used to make the movie palatable to white audiences (as opposed to something like BlacKkKlansman).
That may be true, to an extent (and let me tell you, to this white viewer, it worked). After all, it’s sort of a miracle that this movie exists. There’s a reason why Black Panther figures have not been featured in mainstream movies to this point — or, even more revealing, that their only inclusion is the cartoonish portrayal in Forest Gump.
King has said in many interviews that he struggled to secure financing for the movie, even after attaching executive producer Ryan Coogler (a powerhouse director) and lead actors Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield (rising movie stars). It’s difficult to come up with a reason why for that which does not include racial bias.
But King himself would not classify these story elements as concessions. He initially pitched the movie as “The Departed inside the world of Cointelpro” (the name for J. Edgar Hoover’s covert operation against liberal and black activists), and much of that DNA still exists in the final version.
The movie’s protagonist is Bill O’Neal, a car thief coerced by the FBI into infiltrating and spying on the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers. There he befriends Hampton, the chapter’s chairman, and gets sucked in by the gravitational pull of Hampton’s other worldly charisma.
Hampton’s messages serve less as soap box sermons and more as acts of character building. Over the course of the movie the invincible facade of the leader is stripped away and we’re left with a very human individual, a boyfriend and father and friend. O’Neal’s wavering loyalties likewise construct a complex portrait of him as a person, making the pair’s ultimate confrontation almost Shakespearean in its tragedy.
All of which is to say, it’s a really well constructed story. It’s exciting and intriguing, filled with tension and also comedy, heroism and cowardice. On a technical level, the camera control and staging is crisp and purposeful, with moments of flash and sizzle. King has revealed himself to be a top tier talent.
The movie is then elevated from good to exceptional by unbelievable acting performances. Stanfield shoulders the bulk of the plot in his usual interesting and nuanced way, leaving room for Kaluuya’s Hampton to erupt off the screen as an absolute force of nature. Kaluuya is the rarest of combinations, an incredible actor with mega star charisma, and here he’s at the top of his game. His speeches as Hampton enter the lexicon of modern cinema history instantly, and if he’s not rewarded with a Best Supporting Oscar in April, we riot. Also, it would be unjust not to mention strong support performances from Jesse Plemens, Martin Sheen and Dominique Fishback.
And along the way, yes, the political messages seep through. “Kill a little pig, get a little satisfaction,” isn’t exactly subtle. But the power of the movie is that it serves as both an immersive experience producing empathy for those who could never agree with the call to arms, and a loud beating drum for those who would support it wholeheartedly.
The message of the movie is not safe. It’s not sugar coated. It’s not status quo.
Which is exactly the reason why I’m making it my crusade to campaign for this movie and against The Trial of the Chicago 7 for the Oscars. It’s a good movie! And I love Sorkin! But after seeing Judas and the Black Messiah (or Mangrove, for that matter), Sorkin’s well-meaning-white-folks movie is exposed as phony.
“This is what real revolution looks like,” says Sacha Baron Cohen’s Abbie Hoffman to a room full of college-educated white guys during one scene in Chicago 7. The movie ends with swelling strings playing underneath a fictionalized closing statement in which a future senator finally finds the courage to read out the names of people who have died thousands of miles away in Vietnam.
“You can kill a revolutionary but you can’t kill a revolution,” says Kaluuya’s Hampton in Judas, to an auditorium filled with black, Puerto Rican, and white men and women, many of whom will themselves lose their lives for the cause.
I’ll let you decide which of those messages should be rewarded by Hollywood’s annual virtue signaling ceremony.
Nominations are announced on March 15th. We’ll see what happens.
