Denzel Washington stars as Macbeth, with Bertie Carvel as Banquo, Macbeth’s friend and foil.
If you’ve read any Shakespeare, it was probably either Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth. There are good reasons for that. First of all, they’re short for Shakespeare. Second, they’re both crowd-pleasers. Romeo and Juliet’s tale of doomed young love is relatable. Everyone’s had that first romance that feels like everything in the world depends on it. Shakespeare just took it to extremes.
As for Macbeth, it’s got bad love, greed, and murder — all the juicy ingredients of a good film noir. Plus, there’s the added supernatural element of the three witches, which gives what is at heart a tale of sordid political intrigue a Halloween-y vibe.
Joel Coen knows his way around a good film noir. Along with his brother Ethan, he’s produced some of the best neo-noir in Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, and The Man Who Wasn’t There. Since Coen’s wife happens to be three-time Academy Award winner Frances McDormand and Lady Macbeth is one of the juiciest female parts in all of English literature, staging Macbeth is a natural choice. And when I say “staging,” I mean it literally. The Tragedy of Macbeth is theatrical to a fault. There are no sweeping battle scenes like Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V. When Malcolm’s camouflaged army emerges from Birnam Wood to depose the tyrant our antihero has become, there are only a couple dozen of them. But it’s perfect for Macbeth, which was never intended to be historically accurate anyway. The real king Macbeth ruled Scotland peacefully for 17 years and was, by contemporary accounts, well-liked.
Shakespeare’s description of the “weird sisters” as grave-robbing crones gave us the modern use of the word “weird” as something strange and perhaps icky. But “wyrd” was an Anglo-Saxon word for “fate,” which was already archaic by the time the Bard used it to describe the witches who tell Macbeth some select details about his own destiny. At its heart, Macbeth is a psychological horror story about being destroyed by our own fears of the future.
To explore the wellspring of film noir, Coen goes back to the cinema that provided visual inspiration for films like Out of the Past and Double Indemnity, the silent-era German Expressionism of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu. Macbeth’s castle at Inverness is made up of shadows and suggestion, and the thane meets his witches on a bare stage, shrouded in fog.
The characters, on the other hand, are solid and real. With a Macbeth that is as technically meticulous as he is powerful, Denzel Washington once again makes the argument that he is our greatest living actor. He greets King Duncan (Brendan Gleeson) warmly, then kills him cold-bloodedly, and sits on his usurped throne with a lanky arrogance. McDormand’s Lady Macbeth is the opposite of the gritty realism she won the Oscar for in Nomadland. She plots King Duncan’s murder even as her husband’s letter informing her of the witch’s prophecy catches fire in her hands. When she proposes regicide with the phrase “unsex me here,” Washington seems genuinely unsettled by her ruthlessness. Together, they are not the young couple whose ambitions for playing the game of thrones blinds them to the moral cost, but rather two royals with a long history of scheming for the crown who finally see their chance and take it. There’s not a sour note in the supporting cast, with standout performances by Gleeson, a fiery Corey Hawkins as Macduff, and veteran actor Kathryn Hunter (who was the first woman to ever play King Lear on the English stage) as the three witches.
One aspect of the play Coen zeros in on is, once the foul deeds are done, how empty the prize of the throne turns out to be for the Macbeths. Their celebratory banquets reek of forced merriment, and their subjects obey them grudgingly. Lady Macbeth dies unmourned, even by her husband, and when it comes time to fight for the crown, no one rallies to Macbeth’s side. By the time the usurper king is punished by Macduff’s sword, Macbeth’s fight for power at all costs has already swallowed him whole. Coen has taken Shakespeare’s lesson about the ultimate futility of evil and crafted a starkly beautiful film.
The Tragedy of Macbeth is now streaming on Apple TV+.
Matthew Harris is the newest edition to the Contemporary Media team. He is a 2020 graduate of Rhodes College who interned with the Memphis Flyer and Memphis magazine before being hired as an editorial assistant. I persuaded him to watch all three hours and 20 minutes of Spike Lee’s epic 1992 biopic Malcolm X. Our epic conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Chris McCoy: So tell me, what do you know about Malcolm X?
Denzel Washington as Malcolm X
Matthew Harris: I know what I have learned in the American school system. I know he was a civil rights leader. At first, he was anti- working with the African-American establishment. But then that changed close to his death, and he was really like, “You know we really need to stand together with the African-American civil rights movement. We need to be one unified voice.” But he died. A lot of what I know comes secondhand, from hearing my grandparents talk about it, my mom talk about it. But you know, I went to high school in Texas, and we didn’t talk about Malcolm X or any other outside-the-mainstream leaders. Ironically enough, I watched I Am Not Your Negro, which is a documentary based on the works of James Baldwin, two weeks ago. That was really the first time in my life where I was like, “Oh, wow. Okay. This was the movement. There were all these civil rights leaders like Fred Johnson I never really learned about in school.”
Chris: Well, you’re about to learn a lot more. What do you know about the movie Malcolm X?
Matthew: I know It’s a Spike Lee film, and it stars Denzel Washington.
Chris:Have you seen other Spike Lee films?
Matthew: I’ve seen Do the Right Thing, BlacKkKlansman. I ended up watching Da 5 Bloods very, very late last night. Chi-Raq was also by him. I’m a huge Spike Lee fan. I was talking to my mom and told her I was watching Malcolm X because I was helping a friend for something at work. She said, “Oh yeah, you’re going to be mad at the end. You’re going to be mad because Denzel didn’t win an Oscar for his performance, and he was amazing.”
Chris: Not to bias the experiment, but I think your Mom has a point.
201 minutes later …
Chris:Okay, Matthew Harris. You are now someone who has seen Malcolm X. What did you think?
Matthew: Oh, it was really, really, really good. The first half was very hard to watch. There were a lot of decisions that were made where I found myself saying, “No! No! Don’t do that! Just walk away!” The conversation he has with his wife Betty, where she says, “Open your eyes!” is now in my top five movie moments. That’s such a hard scene. He really owes his life to the movement, and is ready to do anything for them. But they were taking advantage of him. You can just tell, knowing this is based on his book, you know it was hard for him to do, and it was such a hard conversation to play. But they just knocked it out of the park. It was so well done.
Chris: Are you upset, like your mom said, that Denzel didn’t get the Best Actor Oscar?
Matthew: I’m pretty angry. Angela Bassett was amazing as well.
Chris: Oh yes. She’s always amazing.
(left) Angela Bassett as Betty Shabazz
Chris: Do you know who actually won, instead of Denzel?
Matthew: Who?
Chris: Al Pacino for Scent of a Woman.
Matthew: Huh.
Chris: I know. That was one of those awards that was a “He’s done so much good stuff, we need to give him one” kind of thing. But come on! Denzel’s so good. The way he carries himself from phase to phase in this movie, you can sort of watch the moral maturity of his character evolve, just from the way Denzel holds his shoulders. It’s stunning.
Robbed
Chris: So what do you think about watching this today? What does this movie say to 2020 America?
Matthew: There were a lot of messages and shots that were so very poignant, especially in the latter half. There’s one shot of Malcolm near the end that I want to say is a fisheye effect, or something like that. And then there’s a lady on the street who stops him, and says, “Don’t let them get you down, don’t let them talk to you like that.” And that’s something Spike Lee does. It’s in BlacKkKlansman as well, with a burning cross. The message of that … As a Black man, there have been times when there’s so much pressure and social tension going on. There’s a weight there. You find yourself with these moments where you’re just on autopilot. I remember there would be days at Rhodes where something would happen, and I would just walk past my friends. They would be like, ‘Hey, Matt, how are you doing?” And I’m just not there, because I’m not in a moment. Keep moving, keep moving on. You have to put yourself into that mindset. That’s how you get from day one to day two because you don’t know any other way. You hear the slight against you, or you see systemic racism, and you’re like, I just can’t deal with that today. You really zone out. I loved that scene.
Chris: That’s one of Spike’s signature shots. It might not have been the first one, but it’s the best one, because of Denzel’s face. What’s going on is pretty simple. It’s a dolly shot with the camera angle pointing up. The actor is just riding on the dolly with the camera. He’s in motion, but he’s not walking. It looks like he’s gliding. He’s ascending, because the motion of the trees in the background is downward, so it’s like he’s ascending to heaven. It’s kind of a Jesus moment. He’s in the Garden of Gethsemane, awaiting his betrayal. Not to be insensitive to him as a Muslim. I think Spike kind of calls himself out there. The woman you were talking about who stops him on the street says “Jesus will protect you.” I was like, yeah, probably not the best thing to say to this guy at this moment. But she meant well.
Never Seen It: Watching Malcolm X with Flyer Writer Matthew Harris (6)
Chris: This movie came out when I was in college. I was already a big Spike Lee fan, because I was a film nerd and I loved She’s Gotta Have It and Do the Right Thing. This is Spike doing the prestige studio movie, 1992 style. It’s a formal exercise for Spike, where in Do the Right Thing, he’s free form. He’s just doing his own thing. But this is a big studio thing, and he did it so much better than anybody else at the time. He’s just good at everything. I’m so jealous of him. He’s great with actors. You just watched Da 5 Bloods, right? What did you think of that?
Matthew: It was good. I think you can sort of categorize Spike Lee films in two ways. There’s the overtly politicized movies, like Malcolm X and BlacKkKlansman. Then there’s the sort of more internalized African-American movies, like Do the Right Thing.
In Da 5 Bloods, the entire premise of the movie is bringing back money to the community that they feel is rightly theirs. But part of it is also dealing with how African Americans see themselves. How do they deal with their struggle, their problems? BlacKkKlansman and Malcolm X, you have characters who live in a political sphere. It’s about how they navigate the space around them, how they exist in the space around them. So, one thing I harken back to in BlacKkKlansman, you have this really strong African-American lead who has to go through changes. But then at the end of the day, he realizes it doesn’t matter what changes he goes through. He’s just found a way to live, but the world doesn’t really care.
In Malcolm X, we have a character who goes through significant changes. We follow him throughout his entire life, and in the end, nothing changes. He’s murdered, Black men and women are still facing prejudice, the injustice is still occurring, and the movie ends. That’s one thing I’ve always liked about Spike Lee movies, especially the politicized ones — they don’t have happy endings. That’s real life. Even Da 5 Bloods is not a super happy ending.
Chris: Most of them die. And Delroy Lindo dies sort of unredeemed. Did you notice him in this movie? He’s so good as Malcolm’s criminal mentor.
(left) Delroy Lindo as West African Archie, Malcolm Little’s criminal mentor.
Chris: I was keeping track of the timing. The first hour is basically a gangster movie.
Matthew: It’s like a gangster movie, then it’s like The Green Mile or Shawshank Redemption, then it becomes a political movie.
Chris: And when it’s The Shawshank Redemption, it’s better than the actual Shawshank Redemption! Spike’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I can do this!” Another one he does is JFK, the Oliver Stone movie that was out the year before this. I really noticed it during the part where Malcolm made the comments about the assassination. It’s cut like an Oliver Stone montage in that moment. Spike is just casually doing everyone else’s riffs better than they could.
Like you said, it’s kind of a hard movie to watch, because it’s almost three and a half hours long. But it doesn’t feel like I’m wasting my time. I’m the biggest nerd you’ll ever meet, but when I spent three hours with those Hobbit movies, I felt like I was wasting my time.
Matthew: There’s no space wasted in this movie.
Never Seen It: Watching Malcolm X with Flyer Writer Matthew Harris (3)
Chris: One thing that struck me this time was, this isn’t just a movie about racism. It’s exploring racism as a phenomenon. It poses the question, which Malcolm’s life does — when he was a Black separatist in a cult of personality, as the Nation of Islam was — was he a racist? Ultimately, he comes around to cosmopolitanism after he goes to Mecca and sees everybody worshiping together. He gets a new perspective when he leaves the racist environment of America. I don’t have the answer to that question, and that makes it uncomfortable to watch for a lot of people.
Matthew: Being a younger African American, and going to college at a PWI, a Primarily White Institution, I met people on different ends of the spectrum. In Texas, I grew up as pretty much always the only Black person in the room. People are always going to ask me questions. People are going to do microaggressions towards me. But they don’t know. I have very curly hair, and some of my earliest memories from middle school are people playing with my hair. … They had never been around people with Black hair.
So, when I came to Rhodes, I was very different than people there, because I was like, “Hey, you know it’s okay to tell people that they’re wrong and to educate people.”And I met a lot of people who were like, “No, they should know, and they’re either with us, or they’re against us.” I saw so much of that in Malcolm X, with the kind of transformation he makes. At Boston College, there’s this one white lady who asks, “What can I do to help you?” And he says, “Nothing.” To this day, I know people who are like that. “There are no good white people. They’re all out to get us.” I’ve seen people, as they get older, make the transformation that Malcolm makes. I think a lot of African Americans make that change in their life. They’re like, “Is my outlook toward other people, toward people who are trying to be allies, problematic?”
‘Nothing.’
And it’s so crazy because I had a conversation with my mom last week. We were talking about Juneteenth. We’re from Texas, and Juneteenth is a state holiday. We got the day off. My mom never celebrated. She thought it was really dumb. And with everything that was happening, people were wishing her a happy Juneteenth. And she’s like, “Am I a jerk or an asshole if I email people back and tell them I don’t celebrate Juneteenth?” We had a really long conversation where I told her I think that she’s being a little hard. Because these are people who don’t know any way to ally. This is the way that some people told them that they can be an ally. They’re doing their best, they’re making an effort, and you’re basically just shitting on them for making an attempt.
Chris: I think that the tribal instinct, you know, the instinct toward being a member of a group of people who are like you, a sort of extended family group, is natural. And it served humanity well for a really long time. But it also turns toxic. We just have to figure out a way to extend that feeling in people toward all of humanity at once, if that makes any sense. I don’t know if I’m making sense right now. That’s the way forward. And what Malcolm says in the letter that he writes to Betty from Mecca is that racism is leading toward an inevitable disaster. That’s someone who has seen a higher wisdom.
Matthew: That reminded me of Kendrick Lamar at the end of To Pimp a Butterfly. In the song “Mortal Man,” he has a conversation with a recording of Tupac. One of the things he talks about is that there’s going to come a point in time when African Americans are going to start shooting back. He likens it to Nat Turner. That’s something I’ve always thought about, with things going on today. You can only push and push and push so much before people push back. I’m not going to compare 1960s America with 2020 America, but I think a lot of the pushback we’ve seen recently is due to 400 years of systematic oppression, of taking people’s voices away. Of saying, no, you can’t protest like that. You can’t say this, you can’t kneel. You eventually back people into a corner, where they say, “How can I speak out on the injustices that are in front of me without breaking the law?” If the only way you’re going to listen to me is by breaking the law, and that’s the only way change is going to happen, what other choices do you have? I care about my family, and I care about the people around me, and I care about the people who look like me. Every time I’ve tried to raise my voice, you’ve shut me down, but when I go out and shut down a street, that’s illegal. So when I first saw that, that’s all I could think of. All that anger and frustration, and people are going to rise up. And people are rising up.
Never Seen It: Watching Malcolm X with Flyer Writer Matthew Harris (2)
2016 has had more than its share of remakes, both good (Ghostbusters) and not so good (The Jungle Book). Director Antoine Fuqua’s version of The Magnificent Seven gives us something new: A remake of a remake.
I’ll cut Fuqua a little slack here: People have been remaking and reimagining the Seven Samurai practically since the moment Akira Kurosawa locked picture. First up was John Sturges’ 1960 western The Magnificent Seven starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, and five others, which made “assemble a team of misfits to perform a seemingly doomed and intractable task” a thing in American film. Then there was The Guns of Navarone, which put Gregory Peck and David Niven in charge of a group of misfit soldiers in World War II (It had a sequel starring Harrison Ford). The Dirty Dozen kept the World War II motif and postulated, if seven is good, 12 must be great! In 1980, Roger Corman cashed in on the Star Wars craze with Battle Beyond the Stars, which he successfully pitched as “The Seven Samurai — in space!” Pixar got into the act with A Bug’s Life. The upcoming Star Wars film Rogue One features a group of misfits recruited by the Rebellion to steal the plans for the Death Star. Guess how many people are on the rebel team!
Standard operating procedure is to give your Seven Samurai remake a different title, but this is 2016 Hollywood we’re talking about here, so we’re sticking with The Magnificent Seven. Taking up the leadership mantle left behind by Yul Brynner is Denzel Washington as Sam Chisolm, a tough but fair bounty hunter whom we meet single handedly busting up a saloon as he brings an evildoer to justice. Denzel (who is one of those actors whose reputation is so huge you only have to use his first name) sports the same all-black cowboy getup as Brynner and some impressive frontier facial hair. This is the kind of action role he’s mostly been relegated to in the last decade or so, which is kind of a shame, because the Malcolm X actor could use some good juicy parts besides Flight. Denzel’s been phoning it in the last few movies — most notably in director Fuqua’s 2014 snoozer The Equalizer — but there’s more pep in his step this time around. Denzel looks like he’s having fun riding high in the saddle through the Painted Desert.
Luke Grimes (left), Haley Bennett, and Denzel Washington saddle up.
Denzel’s opposite is Peter Sarsgaard as Bartholomew Bogue, a well-heeled mining magnate who aims to clear out the little frontier town of Rose Creek so he can extract the mineral wealth underneath it without paying any pesky royalties to the landowners. The film opens with the town’s denizens debating their best course of action in Rose Creek’s idyllic clapboard church, and Fuqua gives Bogue a mustache-twirling entrance, ringed by shotgun-toting heavies. It’s the first sign that this is going to be an old-fashioned, Western shoot-’em-up with well-defined good and bad guys. One of the casualties of Bogue’s opening strong-arm tactics is the husband of Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett); as she sets out to find armed help, she’s moved at least as much by revenge as she is by saving the town.
The other notable members of the band of seven heroes include Chris Pratt as Josh Faraday, a gambler who is pressed into service when Chisolm gets his horse out of hock. Pratt’s job, like Toshiro Mifune in Seven Samurai, is to provide a side order of comic relief to the relentless gun-toting heroism. Ethan Hawke plays a former confederate sharpshooter named Goodnight Robicheaux as a PTSD case seemingly held together only by the marijuana cigarettes his sidekick Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee) provides at crucial moments. Vincent D’Onofrio’s Jack Horne is a tracker who is introduced just after receiving a major head injury, and he plays it to the hilt by quoting jumbled, half-remembered biblical passages. It’s inevitable in a cast this size that some of the members are going to get short shrift, and that’s what happens with Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), the Mexican outlaw, and Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier), the Comanche warrior.
The best way to sum up this Magnificent Seven‘s strengths and weaknesses is to say that it’s an old-fashioned Western, with all that implies. Fuqua and company construct some killer action sequences, and at least make a nod toward multiculturalism with the integrated cast. But it doesn’t expand the genre in a significant way like Clint Eastwood did with The Unforgiven, and it lacks the verve of the Coen brother’s True Grit remake. Ultimately, it’s the reinvigorated Denzel Washington that makes this worthwhile, if not essential, viewing.
It’s been a long time since country music fans have been treated to music news that includes the line, “Cash will be released when sober.” But they say history repeats. They also say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Johnny Cash’s son, John Carter Cash, was arrested in Deer Lake, Newfoundland last week for stripping down to his underwear in the airport. Thankfully nobody was struck blind and security successfully convinced the pasty, 44-year-old country singer to put his clothes back on. Nobody pressed charges, and so far, there’s still no word as to whether or not this life-altering event will result in a song called “Monday Pants Coming Down,” “The Man in White (Cotton Briefs),” or “Newfoundland Drunk Tank Blues.”
He Got Game
Justin Lee Seay, 21, of Memphis executed a strange plan to avoid being taken into custody by Murfreesboro police for felony marijuana possession. Last week, he told officers that he wasn’t just any old pothead but none other than 59-year-old Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington. Unfortunately, being Denzel Washington doesn’t provide any kind of diplomatic immunity, and even if it did, nobody was buying the story.
Broke Dancer
Ed Smith, a 54-year-old former Memphian, became a viral video star last week when he visited a Bank of America branch to make his final $10,000 alimony payment. Smith said he was so happy he was going to breakdance. It looked more like a terrible seizure, but no ambulance was called.
BullS#!t
Al Green’s got cattle issues. One of the singer’s bulls is tired of being alone. It doesn’t want to stay together and has once again jumped the fence to go wandering in Shelby Forest, just as several of Green’s bulls did in the fall of 2011. According to WMC-TV’s report, a “bucket of greens” had been set out in hopes that it might tempt the animal to come back home.
If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to be cornered by me at a cocktail party, you know I am a man of many theories. But this theory is about why, in 2014, Hollywood would sink $50 million into an adaptation of a third-rate TV show from the 1980s about Bob McCall, an ex-CIA agent who goes all Dirty Harry on New York City as a way to atone for his past sins committed in the service of The Company.
What’s that, you say? You didn’t know this Denzel Washington vehicle was a TV reboot? Isn’t the whole idea of rebooting popular entertainment franchises from the past to capitalize on the brand recognition built up over the years, so as to save marketing money and cut through the audience’s mental clutter in today’s go-go internet world? So why bother rebooting a boring TV show no one remembers as a generic action thriller? Vigilante violence movies are a dime a dozen. Just pick a new title, give Washington a gun, and let the bad-guy blood flow.
Chloë Grace Moretz and Denzel Washington in The Equalizer.
That’s where the theory comes in.
The Equalizer movie exists because the real audience for this kind of project is not the audience, as in the public. It’s a pitch designed to attract studio investment by appealing to the decision makers, who, at this point in time are rich white guys in their 40s and older. To that very small but very powerful audience, The Equalizer is gold. They’re the ones who fondly remember the series, which starred Edward Woodward, an English actor who was 55 when the show premiered in 1985. My theoretical execs were teenagers back then, and things were so much simpler: the Russians were the bad guys, women knew their place, and an old man with a full head of white hair named Ronald Reagan took care of everything. But today’s audiences, whom the execs must court, are so confusing and scary. “So, yeah,” they say. “Let’s make that Equalizer movie! Everybody loves The Equalizer!”
Seen through the lens of this theory, so many inexplicable Hollywood phenomena, such as the fiasco of the Battleship movie, make more sense. It certainly explains The Equalizer, which was supposed to star noted aging Australian actor Russell Crowe, who could at least sound like Woodward, but ended up starring a tired looking Washington rocking dad jeans like it was his job.
The movie opens with McCall working in a Home Mart, presumably because the Home Depot product placement deal fell through at the last minute. He’s a stand-up guy whom everyone likes, but he is sad, because he is a widower with a dark past. So on nights when he can’t sleep, he frequents a coffee shop where he befriends trashily dressed Russian prostitute Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz). But when he sees Teri get a life-threatening beat down at the hands of her pimp, he decides to get involved and use his CIA superpowers, which manifest themselves onscreen as CSI montages of Washington’s bored eyes looking at stuff, to help her out. But just helping a much younger woman dress more modestly while proving the superior virility of older men isn’t enough to build a movie around, so it turns out that the guys pimping this particular street hooker are big time Russian gangsters who call in the anti-Equalizer in the form of Marton Csokas, an ex-Spetznaz agent who calls himself Teddy. Hijinx, in the form of comfort violence for the go-to-bed-early set, ensue.
Teri, the woman who all of this trouble is supposedly for, completely disappears from the movie for an hour until returning, more modestly dressed, after the climactic set piece inside the Home Mart where McCall gets to do all of those ultra violent things with tools you fantasize about while you’re in Home Depot. Or at least, I fantasize about them, which just goes to show that, as a guy who grew up in the ’80s, I am in the target audience for this film. I only wish, like my theoretical Hollywood execs, I had the means to stop it from happening.
Scott Barretta felt skeptical when he was cold-called May 1st to share ideas for a film project. The former editor of esteemed Swedish blues magazine Jefferson and Oxford, Mississippi’s Living Blues had grown accustomed to such queries. “Having worked in blues, I’m used to getting milked for information by people making documentary films,” Barretta says. The drill is quite simple. “They’ll say they’d like to work with me, I tell them everything I know, and they never call me back.”
G. Marq Roswell, who contacted Barretta, proved to be more than a purist on a shoestring budget. Roswell has over 50 credits as music supervisor in motion pictures including Wild at Heart, The Commitments, and Baadasssss!.
Two-time Oscar winner Denzel Washington hired Roswell to re-create African-American blues, jazz, and gospel from the mid-1930s — without the crack and hiss of the surviving sounds of those days on 78 rpm records — as the aural backdrop for TheGreat Debaters, the story of a small black college in Texas taking the national debate championship in 1935 against rather long odds. Washington directed, produced, and starred in the film, and his fingerprints are all over the soundtrack, for which Barretta facilitated recording sessions and wrote liner notes.
The soundtrack bridges different genres and generations of black music practitioners to make old music in original combinations that include Memphis musicians Alvin “Youngblood” Hart, Teenie and Leroy Hodges, and Billy Rivers and the Angelic Voices of Faith choir.
Hart bristles at the thought of himself as a revivalist. “As far as being the preservation society — that’s not me,” he says. Nevertheless, Hart and the African-American string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops immediately came to mind when Roswell asked Barretta to recommend musicians for a juke-joint scene.
“Alvin’s simply the best person alive playing that style of acoustic blues,” Barretta says. “I’d just seen the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and it became clear to me that if you hooked them up with Alvin, it’d be great, so I suggested that to Roswell. He liked the mp3s I sent and asked where we should record. I said, ‘Why don’t we do it in Memphis?'”
“It” required three two-day recording sessions at Ardent studio. Atlantic Records released the soundtrack, with 13 songs made in Memphis, on December 11th.
The youngest of the featured artists, the 30-and-under Carolina Chocolate Drops, play the oldest style. They represent a black string-band tradition that “has always been there, it’s just hidden,” explains Dom Flemons, a 25-year-old multi-instrumentalist who joins Rhiannon Giddons and Justin Robinson to round out the Chocolate Drops’ lineup. “We might be the first black string band in a major motion picture,” Flemons adds.
“Working with the Carolina Chocolate Drops was fun because they’re years younger than me,” Hart explains. “Looking back when I was their age, I was wondering if there was anybody else into this stuff. This was something I’ve been waiting for.”
Washington wanted a modern-day Bessie Smith, the prototype blues queen who died following a wreck on a Mississippi highway in 1937. He found her in Sharon Jones, the soul singer from Brooklyn who, along with her Dap-Kings, has released the year’s soul revival hit album 100 Days, 100 Nights. Despite her historical leanings as an artist, Jones says she wasn’t fully aware of the Memphis music legacy until she arrived at Ardent studio to cut tracks for The Great Debaters.
“I was standing there where Booker T. & the MG’s had recorded, playing with Alvin and Teenie [Hodges],” Jones explains. “I wasn’t familiar with Memphis’ reputation when I got there, but being there was an education.” Hart, the guitarist whom Taj Mahal once described as possessing “thunder in his hands,” knew to expect the unexpected at the Ardent sessions.
“The funny thing about recording in Memphis is that you never know who’s going to show up,” Hart says. “I’d worked with the Hodges brothers maybe 10 years ago. They showed up. Then somehow we started working with Billy Rivers and the Angelic Voices of Faith choir. I’m glad that the soundtrack work was done here and the producers of the film kept coming back and getting more local people involved.”
It’s a treat to hear Teenie Hodges, whose name is synonymous with the plush sound of the 1970s, pluck his acoustic on the foot-stomping Piedmont blues duet “Step It Up and Go” with Hart. “Teenie’s certainly not known as an acoustic blues player, but that’s what he did, and when he and Alvin played together, it was seamless,” Barretta says.
Barretta explains that Washington wanted to begin and conclude the film with musical prayers. Memphis got Jones in the mood.
“I go to church, and I know what it’s like when the Holy Ghost comes through. People get to shouting,” Jones says. “During the recording, I could literally feel it. Some kind of something came over me in that studio while I was singing ‘My Soul Is a Witness.’ It was like I was in church, and I got happy.”
Jones’ happiness has yet to wear off. “I know I’m not dreaming,” she says. “I know it’s for real, and I know it’s done. This is something I’ll tell stories about for a long time.”
The project left the performers with a sense of unique accomplishment, as Hart explains: “If you’d have told me when I was a 15-year-old wannabe guitar player in the garage that I was going to be working with Denzel Washington, I would have said, ‘What?'”
The Great Debaters opens at movie theaters on Christmas day.
David Simon, the creative force behind HBO’s The Wire, once wrote a memo to his boss that argued the merits of his show’s deep-focus approach to the problems of drug dealing and law enforcement, claiming that “no one who sees HBO’s take on the culture of crime and crime fighting can watch anything like CSI or NYPD Blue or Law & Order again without knowing that every punch was pulled on those shows.”
Since Simon wrote this, The Wire has rendered most television crime shows absurdly two-dimensional. But did he ever imagine that his show would cast long, imposing shadows onto the crime movie landscape?
For anyone familiar with The Wire, watching director Ridley Scott’s plodding, generic American Gangster is like perusing a child’s flip book after reading an epic novel. Seen through cinematographer Harris Savides’ grimy, de-saturated urban lens, the film’s simplistic police-procedural details, sophomoric political insights, and facile capitalist ironies are nothing more than a collection of garage-sale leftovers from some low-rent screenwriters swap meet.
American Gangster is based on the true story of Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), a Harlem thug who, inspired by the rise of the big-box retailers in the late 1960s, decides to cut out the middle man and import heroin from Thailand with a little help from his cousin (a spooky Roger Guenveur Smith). As Frank’s empire grows, he attracts the attention of Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), a New Jersey police investigator whose devotion to duty destroys his marriage and draws the concentrated ire of NYPD detective Trupo (Josh Brolin) and his leather gang of Prince of the City goons. These characters sidle around and among each other in a New York/New Jersey crowded with new and leftover consumer goods, garbage, and human casualties from the drug trade.
Aside from implicit storyline comparisons to The Wire, American Gangster has an explicit connection to the show: Former Wire star Idris Elba appears briefly as a rival to Lucas and his expanding empire. Together, Elba and Washington exude gunfighter bravado in a pair of tense street scenes. Yet such pimpalicious behavior is no longer fresh. And is it finally okay to say that Denzel Washington is a tiresome anti-hero? He’s been working his calm charm and devil’s-advocate verve for quite a while now, but he’s one “hooah!” and one more “intense,” nobody’s-home glower away from permanent membership in the Pacino-De Niro Ridiculous Actor Hall of Fame — where he can join Armand Assante, whose buffoonish performance in American Gangster as a skeet-shooting mafia don is what should (but, sadly, won’t) be the movie goombah’s death rattle.
Lucas’ cutthroat business policies are never questioned. His nascent drug empire is justified as vengeance capitalism; he came from hard times, so he’s out to get his, and who’s to blame if most of the damage his business does is equivalent to black-on-black crime? Is the unquestioned law of the expanding corporation so ingrained in our consciousness that even illegal enterprises are glorified if they are effective? Is there no courage left in movies for any critical look at the disastrous effects of free-market madness? Short answer: not during Oscar season, my man.
