Pros and cons of 'The Great Debaters'

(B-) An optimistic movie set during the Great Depression, the fact-based The Great Debaters coarsens its inspirational story and powerful history with movie devices that date to the 1930s. Director Denzel Washington uses the cliffhanging climaxes and heartwarming turnarounds that made audiences 70 years ago want to stand up and cheer. But he also inserts the explosive racial material that Old Hollywood ignored - and social volatility doesn't naturally fit into these rah-rah forms.

In the cliche-ridden script by Robert Eisele, the superb debate squad from all-black Wiley College in East Texas witnesses every indignity and injustice of the Jim Crow South in the course of one year (1935). On the road, they run into a lynching, and in town they see the Marshall, Texas, sheriff's harassment of the coach for organizing black and white tenant farmers. Then the debaters use it all to fuel their argument in favor of civil disobedience during a climactic (and fictional) duel with a champion white team at Harvard.

If the film didn't sway with teeter-totter regularity between victories and disappointments - notably, the resignation of a conservative debater (played by the solid, persuasive Jermaine Williams) because of the coach's leftism - the team's record of success would be exhilarating.

The Wiley coach, Mel Tolson Jr. (Denzel Washington), does raise the bar exhilaratingly high when it comes to eloquence. Then the filmmakers lower the bar for dramaturgy. Even at a climax already filled with tension and elation, the script can't resist showing the coach, at legal risk because of his political problems in Texas, quietly walking into the Cambridge, Mass., debate hall to see his crack unit's star-making performance. The setup and payoff are straight out of boxing films and backstage musicals.

Too much of the movie is simultaneously stirring and pat. But it is engrossing throughout its over-two-hour length.

The Great Debaters has already been criticized for ensuring that the Wiley team is on the correct side of every argument. Maybe it was. But what I found most disturbing was that Tolson devises his students' arguments for them, although they do the research and presumably most of the writing, and are champing at the bit to do it all.

Tolson says he wants to liberate their brains, but if it's part of his plan to test their minds and then set them totally free by season's end, he never articulates that strategy - and it doesn't happen until Harvard says the Wiley debaters must construct their own cases.

You wish you saw more of the team interplay involving the magnetic Nate Parker as the dashing, independent Henry Lowe, and the calmly charismatic Jurnee Smollett as Samantha Brooke, who offers a fresh and vital image of a proper pre-law student.

Both these characters are composites, but even when depicting the real-life hero at its center, the film merely scrapes psychological depths with a sounding line; it doesn't flesh them out. Tolson was not only an ace debate coach but also a leftist and a poet. But The Great Debaters treats his activism so superficially that it functions mainly as one more obstacle for the team when it gets him into trouble. And poetry enters the picture only in his demand for fluid oratory and learned quotation.

Yet even when the film is flimsy and derivative - at times, Washington's Tolson carries on like the willfully provocative Robin Williams of Dead Poets Society - it has liveliness and warmth. Washington taps the potential in the material's vivid juxtapositions: juke joints and classrooms, illiterate rednecks and hyper-literate African-Americans intent on establishing an educational tradition of their own.

In Forest Whitaker, Washington gives himself a co-star who ups everybody's game. Playing James Farmer, one of the country's first blacks to earn a doctorate, as well as an administrator and professor at Wiley, Whitaker delivers a simmering performance, as potent in its wounded dignity and backbone as his Idi Amin Dada (The Last King of Scotland) was in his let-it-all-hang-out fury.

Farmer mistrusts Tolson; he considers his colleague reckless. When he makes that charge to Tolson's face, neither actor gives an inch. They climb into each other's craniums. And their performances are matched by that of Denzel Whitaker, no relation to either of them yet sharing their fire and powers of reflection. As James Farmer Jr. (future founder of CORE), he offers an astonishing portrait of a freshman prodigy who hasn't yet turned his intellectual curiosity and emotional openness into adult strengths.

You don't need a Ouija board to guess his ups and downs, but even when you're disappointed with the film's predictability, there's something invigorating about the way it embraces literacy and argument.

Philippe Rousselot did the cinematography, which is as alive to texture as Washington's ensemble-work is to mood. If the setbacks and victories click like clockwork, at least the clockwork here is fine-tooled and handmade.

>>>The Great Debaters (The Weinstein Co.). Starring Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, Denzel Whitaker. Directed by Denzel Washington. Rated PG-13. Time 123 minutes.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com

Related topic galleries: Robin Williams, Minority Groups, Idi Amin, Forest Whitaker, Demonstration, Denzel Washington, Academic Progress

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