On Sunday night, we could witness the first Black filmmaker to win an Oscar for best director. Or not.
Sorry if that got your hopes up, but the prize that should go to Barry Jenkins for his impressionistic and melancholic Moonlight will likely end up in Damien Chazelle’s hands there’s no stopping La La Land‘s warm and fuzzy charm.
Not that I ever expected Moonlight to win big on Oscar night. The movie is better than that its achievement, as both art and a galvanizing moment for diversity in filmmaking, won’t dim after Sunday. The honesty and intimacy Jenkins achieves shows why people of colour must be behind the camera, not just in front of it.
This weekend, three films directed by Black filmmakers open in Toronto: Amma Assante’s staid historical romance A United Kingdom, Jordan Peele’s prickly interracial thriller Get Out and Raoul Peck’s searing documentary I Am Not Your Negro.
James Baldwin in I Am Not Your Negro (2016)
The latter plunges us back into the civil rights era via the words of Black author and social critic James Baldwin. His incomplete manuscript about time spent with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X is the spine of Peck’s unfiltered look at racism in America. Samuel L. Jackson lends his voice, reading Baldwin’s ruminations on systematic oppression and the lack of empathy of even the most well-meaning white folks, which remind us how little things have changed.
Baldwin even sounds off about the movies, measuring Hollywood’s progress from Stepin Fetchit to Sidney Poitier. For Baldwin, Poitier’s stature withered because the actor had to play it safe and polite for white audiences, unable to expose his Black fury. His sweetback sexuality was castrated in “liberal” films like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
I wonder whether Baldwin would approve of how Jordan Peele rejigs Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner into a paranoid horror movie. Or whether the Black and gay author would soak up Moonlight’s embrace. And what would he make of this year’s Oscars, courting its most diverse slate yet with POC nominees in acting, cinematography and editing?
What would he think of Hidden Figures, the bitter pill among this year’s celebrated diversity?
Hidden Figures, by a white writer and director team, offers up the same polite and safe take on civil rights struggles we’ve seen in The Help and Sidney Poitier films.
In an article published last month that garnered plenty of hate-clicks, I stated that this feel-good story about three African-American women at NASA is exactly the kind of film we should not be celebrating. Sure, seeing strong Black women on screen is commendable in exactly the way the studio behind it hoped, but unlike Moonlight, it didn’t give us any diversity in storytelling. It’s exactly the kind of polite and safe take on civil rights struggles we’ve seen in The Help and Poitier’s films.
I pegged the problem with Hidden Figures on a rushed production (in response to #OscarsSoWhite) and a white writing and directing team (Theodore Melfi and Allison Schroeder) who shaped facts into traditional Hollywood fiction, softened the anger into disappointment and threw in yet another glorified white saviour.
In a climactic moment, Taraji P. Henson’s math genius Katherine Johnson’s boss, played by Kevin Costner, smashes a sign segregating bathrooms by colour. In a Vice interview, Johnson says that never happened. She never adhered to the segregated bathroom rules, and no one stopped her. But replacing her wilful defiance with Costner’s bravado gives a white audience a heroic comfort zone, a guilt-free point of identification.
Though its Oscar nominations and boffo box office argue otherwise, Hidden Figures’ artificiality is another reason why we need to see more people of colour behind the camera. Compare its sound bites on systematic oppression to the raw, angry, provocative films of Spike Lee. Compare Steven Spielberg’s classicist work on The Color Purple and Amistad to the blood, tears and survival in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave. Compare Taylor Hackford’s conventional biopic Ray to F. Gary Gray’s blistering look at NWA, Straight Outta Compton.
There is no white saviour trope in Ava DuVernay’s Selma.
There’s no white saviour trope in films by Lee, Gray, Ava DuVernay and Jenkins. In Selma, DuVernay doesn’t use Lyndon B. Johnson as a prop to comfort white audiences. Jerry Heller doesn’t keep NWA together. Sandra Bullock doesn’t swoop in to save Chiron’s life in Moonlight.
And Damien Chazelle won’t be handing his Oscar to Barry Jenkins.
movies@nowtoronto.com | @justsayrad
