The Great Debaters (2007)
Directed by Denzel Washington
Written by Robert Eisele
Starring Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, Nate Parker, Jurnee Smollett, Denzel Parker, John Heard
Release Date December 25th, 2007
Published December 24th, 2007
Melvin B. Tolson is a renowned orator and poet. To find that he was also a champion debater and a teacher of the spoken word is no surprise. Nor is it all that surprising that the students of Mr. Tolson would go on to be champions of civil rights, leaders of men and women and fighters for social justice. Removing this surprise, a film about Mr. Tolson and his students is an admirable yet redundant act.
Fair to admit that Mr. Tolson's acts were more than 70 years ago and thus could use a proper reminding of. However, couldn't we get a more fitting reminder than a conventional Hollywood melodrama? We are talking about some very important history here. Glossing it over with superstar actors and facile, sports movie cliches seems inappropriate at best, blasphemous at worst.
Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of good here. Denzel Washington is the perfect actor to capture the innate intelligence and extraordinary eloquence of Melvin Tolson. Forest Whitaker as the President of Wiley College and the father of one of the debaters, Denzel Whitaker (no relation), is typically Forest Whitaker, a powerful, calming presence.
And yet, I am troubled by much of this well meaning, adequately crafted film. The whole is far too simplistic, playing out serious, historic instances with a typically Hollywood sheen. The typical three act structure with a third act featuring a false crisis/false dawn; real crisis/real dawn scenario seems too prosaic for something as important as what Tolson and his team accomplished.
Tacking on a love story between two of the debaters, Jurnee Smollett and Nate Parker, only makes this already false movie feel less authentic. Both young actors acquit themselves well in the debate scenes, with Smollett shining with a powerful speech on social justice that will have many dabbing away tears, but the love story makes fools of both. It was simply false and unnecessary, a nod to what is expected of modern Hollywood and not what was best for telling this story.
Worse yet is the sports movie aspects of The Great Debaters. As the Wiley College team begins a series of scheduled debates the focus on what is being argued is lost in the cliché of who wins and loses and tracking the wins and losses as if this were a sporting event. It may be true that Tolson and the tiny African American enclave of Marshall Texas took the tact of keeping score, but in the film the device cheapens and distracts.
If removing the conventional inclusion of the love story and the sports movie clichés would render the material un-filmable, then so be it. Maybe this story just wasn't meant to be told in a typically Hollywood fashion. A better form would be the documentary, one where Mr. Washington and Mr. Whitaker could tell the story of the Wiley College debaters without the distraction of melodrama and sports movie score keeping.
The Great Debaters fails for being unoriginal about a wholly original group of characters. It fails to assume the gravitas of its subject and as such, demeans it.
