Review: The Great Debaters

The Great Debaters: ***
Nonna Rating: $$$

We've seen this plot a hundred times before. Spunky little underdog college team works the kinks out of their performance and doggedly wins game after game until they have the chance to confront the BIG COLLEGE team in the ultimate showdown. And we all know what happens. After all, if they hadn't been successful, there would be no reason to make the movie. The plot is tired enough that it takes an awfully special movie to transcend it. Great Debaters does just that. We expect good acting with Denzel and Forrest, but that doesn't guarantee a good film. They are, however, assisted by four young actors who deliver superb performances: Nate Parker, Jurnee Smollett, Denzel Whitaker (no relation to Denzel or Forrest), and Jermaine Williams. And, yes, we're not watching a story focused on athletic events; we're watching the cerebral activity of debaters. But even that's not enough to make it an exceptional film.

It is the context of this David and Goliath story that makes it so special. The film concerns a little college no one has heard of up against Harvard -- a little black college in 1935 Texas. In the film, slavery is much closer to the characters then than it seems to us now, and the law looks the other way when black men and women are harassed or, as in one pivotal scene, lynched. The contrast between the college where the students study and live and the racist world outside the college is profound and disturbing. (This is a good movie for adolescents to see. Not only does it celebrate the power of education, hard work, and determination; it also serves as a platform for difficult discussion of systematic racism and America's sad history of racial oppression.)

I do have a quibble with one aspect of the film: the topics for debate and the assignation of debating positions. The Wiley College team always was given the liberal side of any issue; for example, pro-welfare. This made for some dramatic, impassioned speeches (especially from Ms. Smollett), but it didn't reflect what must have been the actual situation. In debate competitions, one often has to argue passionately on the side of an issue with which one does not agree. It's an integral part of the process. Arguing the other side of an issue provides an understanding and empathy for the other position which, in turn, allows one to argue the side one actually believes in more logically and with even more confidence. Perhaps the film makers thought that the viewing public would be confused by a debate in which the Wiley team took, for example, an anti-welfare position, but I contend this could have been handled in the story as it exists and it would have enhanced the drama.

I recently participated in a disputatio in my Christian Ethics class. A disputatio is a medieval form of debate very similar to modern debate competitions. I was assigned the argument that torture should be used to elicit information. This was an arduous task for me because I don't believe torture is an effective means of gleaning information, but, in arguing it, I had a greater appreciation for the other side of the argument and a better understanding of how to argue against torture in future. Given the nature of that debate and the fact that we often employed proof texts from the early Church Fathers as well as Scripture, I was especially delighted in the movie when Denzel Whitaker quoted St. Augustine in the last debate against Harvard.

Nonna Rating System:
$$$$ = Worth paying the Friday evening price
$$$ = Worth paying the Matinee price
$$ = Worth a rental
$ = Wait for cable
# = Skip it