With The Great Debaters Denzel Washington returns to the director's chair for the first time since Antwone Fisher in 2002. This is his second turn as a director. The film tells an inspiring story that helped plant the seeds for the civil rights movement. It is an important story that is enlightening and puts a positive spin on a dark spot in our recent past, a past that some still hold onto today. Yes, it deals with racism, an evil that still needs to be dealt with to this day.

Seeing a film like The Great Debaters can be an eye-opening experience to those who have not experienced racism. It shows just how bad it was (and this doesn't even scratch the surface), as well as how far we have yet to go. While 1935 seems like a long time ago, it is a relatively short period of time in the grand scheme, and there are those who would wish to hang on to those misguided and flat-out incorrect beliefs.

The Great Debaters is a good movie. It features strong acting, good writing, and good directing. There is no denying that it is a good movie, plus it has a strong pedigree with two Oscar winners on the screen (Washington and Forest Whitaker), not to mention Oprah Winfrey is one of the producers (Harpo Films is one of the companies backing the film). However, despite the talent involved, I cannot help but feel as if I have seen this movie before.

This film falls prey to the same traps that afflict many other true life stories. Many stories that get the big screen treatment have nothing to do with each other, this is a given. It is also assumed that the stories will undergo changes to help punch up the drama while keeping the bigger picture of the story intact, more or less. The problem is in the distillation process, as the bigger, more epic reality of a story needs to be shortened. The entire story, beginning to end, needs to fit inside the running time of a two hour movie (more or less). This editing process leaves the core beats to hit, and as fate would have it, the majority of these stories will match each other in many of those beats. So, telling this story becomes more a matter of how you tell it than what it says. That is not to say that what it says is not important, but the narrative structure of these inspirational tales has become somewhat predictable.

The Great Debaters is no different than Invincible, Walk the Line, Take the Lead, or Glory Road. On the surface those are films of varied subject matter, but if you look at the structure and not the details, you will find films that have a lot in common. Something needs to change in the execution, something that injects more originality into the tried and true formulas, which makes something like I'm Not There such an anomaly in the radically different approach to the true life story (I have not seen it yet, but am surmising based upon what I have read of the unconventional Bob Dylan biopic).