Judas and the Black Messiah

Up front: nothing about this movie is inherently bad or wrong or done poorly. Nothing. So let me get why I can’t go higher on this than three and a half snowflakes. I was born in the late 70’s, almost a decade after the events of this movie. I was not around for the Civil Rights Movement and the murder of its leaders like MLK and Malcolm X. But I have lived through BLM and the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and Eric Garner and dozens of other people who have been victims of a broken system. I’ve seen how the system has pushed back, and how it has highlighted the divisions in America are far, far deeper than we thought. Dr. King, Fred Hampton, Medger Evers. Malcolm X … the murders of these men were not supposed to be in vain. We were supposed to make the world a better place, and we failed. So, all this is a long way of saying that, I think the movie didn’t have the resonance or emotional impact with me it should have because 1) I’m not surprised one bit to see the lengths to which the system will push back against a righteous revolutionary because we’ve seen how much they want to crush people even when they aren’t fighting against the system, and 2) I know what the epilogue is to this story. Watch the news. It hasn’t gotten better. So, yeah, real life, for me, robs this movie of its intended heft and impact. And that’s a damned shame, because it really doesn’t have any faults in what it does. The directing is energetic and well-paced, capturing the gritty, harsh, unpleasantness of 1969 Chicago. The score is magnificent, going from orchestral pieces to soul and funk tunes seamlessly. And then there’s the acting. WOW. If there’s one complaint to be made about it, it’s that it is criminal how Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield were put against each other, and in the SUPPORTING actor category. These two men lead this movie, hands down, with absolutely magnetic performances as Fred Hampton (Kaluuya) and William O’Neal (Stanfield). Kaluuya’s Hampton is a complex leader, a man who preaches action and tearing down the system, a mix of military general and fire-and-brimstone preacher, leading his people in a call to arms … but really wants to make change through diplomacy and kindness. He truly wants to change the world by doing the right thing and more or less drag the world kicking and screaming into decency by using decency. Meanwhile, there’s O’Neal, who is put in a terrible place of being an informant after getting picked up for GTA and impersonating an FBI agent. With J Edgar Hoover wanting to crush the Civil Rights Movement in all possible ways, O’Neal is forced to infiltrate the Black Panthers and feed the Feds information they can use to eliminate the party. Watching Stanfield’s O’Neal slowly but surely question where his own moral line is drawn as he is pinned between losing his own freedom or working to destroy the freedom of a man trying to make the world better is breath-taking. O’Neal has been labeled a traitor by some, but Stanfield’s performance shows a man torn and riddled with guilt. And Jesse Plemons deserves recognition too as FBI Agent Roy Mitchell; he is played to such perfection that his whole spiel to O’Neal about the KKK and the Panthers being opposite side of the same coin will almost convince you he’s not bad. Mitchell’s confrontation with Martin Sheen’s J. Edgar Hoover goes even farther to convince you that Mitchell is a man also caught between a rock and a hard place; he believes in Civil Rights, but he also works for a man who doesn’t. And then, near the end, Mitchell resorts to some pretty shady tactics to get what he needs, and you wonder not only if O’Neal got sold a bill of goods, but if we, the viewer did too. So, yeah, this an excellent movie. I couldn’t point you to a single flaw in it. Not one. I just wish the real world didn’t make this movie feel so hopeless. Because what this movie exposes is that, not only is the war still going on, there’s never been really any ground gained. Fred Hampton deserved better than for his death to mean nothing.