It's not often that a movie is such a crowd-pleaser that the audience responds with tumultuous applause not once but numerous times. That's the reaction Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters inspired when I saw it in a crowded theater. Yes, the movie follows some tried and true underdog movie conventions, but rarely is it done so skillfully as to provide small moral triumphs along the way; in this movie, it is not only the final deciding match that gives people something to stand up and cheer.
This film is, in many ways, the “sports movie” I have been waiting to see. Taking place during the Great Depression, It is based on a true story about an all-African American debate team that hopes to win the national debate championship after facing off against other African-American as well as Caucasian debate teams across the country. This movie's heroes fight their personal and ethical struggles with words, not physicality. Melvin Tolson (Denzel Washington), the professor who forms the debate team in the all-African American Wiley College, sets the grounds: “Debate is like blood sport. Blood sport is combat and the weapons are words.”
His standards are unbending and his expectations demanding, and after a night of tryouts he picks four members. The mainline debaters are Henry Lowe (Nate Parker), an astute, intellectual student who is also a bit of a womanizer and a hard-drinker, and Hamilton Burgess (Jermaine Williams). The two alternates are Samantha Booke (Jurnee Smollett), reportedly the first female college debater in history, and 14-year-old James Farmer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker), the researcher for the team. The latter, despite being the youngest, carries a certain reputation, being the son of James Farmer Sr. (Forest Whitaker), a preacher who is one of the few African-Americans so far to graduate from Harvard University.
The debate team’s singular struggle to win the championship title would be enough to fuel a worthy, inspirational story, but Washington’s film paints a richer canvas that also depicts the harsh issues of racism in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s. There are some harsh emotional moments that drive the prejudice home. A significant one occurs when the team is driving home one night and sees a black man strung up on a cross after being burned to death by a lynch mob. Tolson, one of America’s most renowned poets (a fact that is only slightly hinted at in the film) also, as it turns out, has a secret life as an organizer for a national sharecropper’s union that includes blacks and whites. This angers the racist local sheriff, Dozier (John Heard), and may set yet another obstacle for the team.
Article comments
1 - Lynn Gundran
I was quite surprised to walk in to the (packed)theater where seats were all taken, even in front. One lady even had her little baby with her. I am not black, but boy, did I not put my hands together several times during the movie! I have not been to a movie applauded by the audience some four times or more. Great experience!
2 - The Great Debaters Movie Review
I thought this was a really good movie. It was definitely one of the best movies in 2007. The Great Debaters really delivered this significance of the events to the audience, even though part of the story was fabricated.