The Great Debaters

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

It’s true that The Great Debaters is essentially Remember the Titans with a debate team, but it’s not like that’s a bad thing. With its charismatic lead performance by Denzel Washington, a host of talented young unknowns, and a positive racial message all wrapped within the structure of a sports movie, Remember the Titans is one of the best recent examples of formula done right.

The Great Debaters follows that formula right down to the way they frame their montages through handheld video cameras set to soul music. Denzel Washington is again a charismatic but tough-as-nails teacher, the young unknowns are again talented and likable, and the film is again a period piece fraught with racial tension. This time it goes back even further to 1935, set in Texas, when the Civil Rights movement was still very much a dream.

Washington – who also directed, with an assured but conventional hand – plays Melvin Tolson, the debate team coach at the all-black Wiley College. The film’s structure is unmistakable. After a rigorous audition process, he assembles the team, which includes a tortured and brainy rebel (Nate Parker), a girl (Jurnee Smollett), the occasional comic relief (Jermaine Williams), and most notably a precocious fourteen-year-old played by Denzel Whitaker, who remarkably has no relation to Forest Whitaker, who plays his father (or Washington for that matter).

They will climb in the rankings and unite as a team, the last stop being the climactic debate at Harvard. I wouldn’t dream of giving away whether they win or not.

What makes the movie interesting is that there’s a lot more to it than just the simple, enjoyable formula; the subplots and details give us the texture of the time period. Tolson, we find out, is an activist secretly trying to organize a union for the many poor sharecroppers, white and black. The racist local sheriff (John Heard) targets him as a radical troublemaker; rumors spread that he’s a communist.

Meanwhile, Forest Whitaker’s role, as a preacher and family man, gives us a good portrait of the few well-off black families of the period. There’s an excellent early scene of a run-in between him and a poor white farmer; there’s such a combination of fear and anger – from both men – in the subtext of the action and dialogue that the scene feels like its going to burst.

I was impressed by the time the film gives to the actual debates, which I assumed it would skim over; we actually get to see them, more or less. Annoyingly, the Wiley College team never has to debate a position they disagree with. In the question of “should blacks be allowed to attend all-white colleges,” for example, they of course get to argue that they should. That’s a little too neat for my taste – as one of the principal rules of debating is that you have to be prepared to defend ...