{"id":47790,"date":"2021-02-21T06:55:33","date_gmt":"2021-02-21T06:55:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2021\/02\/judas-black-messiah-film-review\/"},"modified":"2021-02-21T07:03:43","modified_gmt":"2021-02-21T07:03:43","slug":"flaws-and-all-you-should-watch-judas-and-the-black-messiah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/21\/flaws-and-all-you-should-watch-judas-and-the-black-messiah\/","title":{"rendered":"Flaws and All, You Should Watch Judas and the Black Messiah<\/cite>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

The story of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton\u2019s assassination by Chicago Police and the FBI has finally been made into a movie. Judas and the Black Messiah<\/cite> is uneven as a film, but it\u2019s a small step toward a serious reckoning with America\u2019s past.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton in Judas and the Black Messiah<\/cite>. (Photo courtesy Warner Brothers)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

Judas and the Black Messiah<\/em> is a confounding film. I might be the only one who thinks so, as unqualified praise pours in from everywhere. Critically lauded, nominated for major awards, and no doubt a good primer on Fred Hampton<\/a> and the Black Panthers, Judas and the Black Messiah<\/em> nevertheless seems to me an uneasy combination of memorable scenes and rote ones, of powerful fact-based material and overly familiar genre film contrivances.<\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s possible I expected too much. Finally, after waiting to see Judas and the Black Messiah<\/a><\/em> ever since it was announced back in 2019, here it is on HBO Max. And, admittedly, it\u2019s exhilarating to see the charismatic Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out<\/a><\/em>) as Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, delivering lines from Hampton\u2019s electrifying speeches like his triumphant \u201cI am a revolutionary!\u201d call and response.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s the \u201cBlack Messiah\u201d foretold and feared by racist FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (played in monster makeup by Martin Sheen), who\u2019s obsessed with Hampton\u2019s rapidly growing status as an extraordinarily effective socialist organizer. Hampton\u2019s building of the Rainbow Coalition from the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the Appalachian Young Patriots<\/a> into a revolutionary movement was more than enough to sound all the right alarm bells in American halls of power.<\/p>\n

Hoover tasks agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) with the job of destroying Hampton as part of a larger campaign to infiltrate and undermine the burgeoning Black Panther Party. Mitchell is portrayed as a persuasive villain with a soft voice and steady smile that turns increasingly sinister, a character type we\u2019ve seen many times before, particularly from Plemons. He\u2019s given a lot of scenes steadily turning up the heat on \u201cJudas,\u201d aka William O\u2019Neal (played by the talented LaKeith Stanfield of Sorry to Bother You<\/a><\/em>), the small-time criminal coerced by Mitchell into doing the FBI\u2019s dirty work.<\/p>\n

Mitchell starts off by proving his liberal bona fides to O\u2019Neal, indicating his support for the nonviolent efforts of the civil rights movement in contrast to the militant Black Panthers, whom he equates with the Ku Klux Klan. Mitchell becomes steadily more demonic, sometimes creating unintentionally comical effects such as when he appears, magically unnoticed, in an all-black crowd at a Panther rally, rattling O\u2019Neal with the same fixed, unblinking smile.<\/p>\n

But Hampton keeps getting edged off-screen in order to develop O\u2019Neal\u2019s predicament \u2014 finding Chairman Fred more and more persuasive, even as Mitchell twists his arm into setting him up for assassination. Not that it\u2019s a bad narrative move, doing a dual portrait of Hampton and O\u2019Neal, two black men destroyed in different ways by the FBI. But it\u2019s so strained that it\u2019s often distracting.<\/p>\n

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LaKeith Stanfield as William O’Neal in Judas and the Black Messiah<\/cite>. (Photo courtesy Warner Brothers)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s no surprise to find out, from the many interviews<\/a> with the Lucas Brothers \u2014 Keith and Kenny, who are usually associated with stand-up comedy but have been pitching this project since 2014 \u2014 that they had to rework the script outline a number of times, making changes after rounds of failed pitches to producers and studio heads who \u201cdidn\u2019t really see the marketability of the idea.\u201d Finally, they arrived at the winning pitch:<\/p>\n

We want to make it like the 1970s crime, espionage, thriller, and the grain of The Conformist<\/em> or The French Connection<\/em>. We want it to feel like, gritty and \u201870s, but we also want it to tell the story of Fred Hampton.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But even with Shaka King attached to direct, Ryan Coogler producing, and the lead actors on board, raising sufficient money proved difficult, with the project still being dismissed as \u201ca period piece about an obscure Black Panther, and a socialist to boot.\u201d The Lucas Brothers also claim they were caught between genres \u2014 the biopic versus the thriller \u2014 and decided their \u201cframing device\u201d focusing on O\u2019Neal\u2019s betrayal of Hampton was the best move<\/a>:<\/p>\n

It instantly makes it an espionage thriller, and you can avoid typical biopic tropes . . . You want to make sure you have it in a genre that allows you to tell the big parts of his life and get a snapshot of the message but also gets people to actually watch the film.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s weird to find myself objecting to genre film tropes \u2014 me, the biggest genre film booster ever \u2014 but I can\u2019t help regretting it here. There are some powerful sequences, especially given the skill and dynamism of the actors, but the real-life source material is so much richer than is even briefly sketched in the film.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s not a clear enough sense of just how extraordinary Hampton was all of his short life, and how fast he was rising. Even a cursory account is awe-inspiring, with Hampton having forged the Rainbow Coalition with the Panthers, the Latino Young Lords, the white Young Patriots, the socialist Poor People’s Coalition, the American Indian Movement, and the Chinese-American collective the Red Guard \u2014 all before the age of twenty-one.<\/p>\n

When he was murdered in 1969, Hampton wasn\u2019t just chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers \u2014 he was, in all likelihood, ascending to a position of national leadership in the Black Panther Party itself. In the documentary Eyes on the Prize II<\/a><\/em>, it\u2019s ironically the real-life William O\u2019Neal who testifies<\/a> to the challenge Hampton presented to the FBI, which tried every trick in the book to get him on some kind of criminal rap, finally framing him for the theft of $71 worth of ice cream bars, an event depicted in the film.<\/p>\n

We tried to develop negative information to discredit him . . . \u201cwe\u201d meaning the FBI. I tried to come up with signs of him doing drugs or something, but never could. He was clean. He was dedicated.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which brings us to O\u2019Neal himself, who, in his own disturbing way, makes almost as lasting an impression in that documentary as Fred Hampton himself. According to the Lucas Brothers, as soon as they saw the interview footage, <\/em>they were obsessed with capturing O\u2019Neal\u2019s story as well. It\u2019s a riveting confession, all right \u2014 O\u2019Neal is disquietingly blank and matter-of-fact while rationalizing the role he played in Hampton\u2019s murder: \u201cI didn\u2019t walk in there with guns. I didn\u2019t shoot him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then he begins to stutter<\/a> as he actually discusses the raid: \u201c[T]he information, the, the, the, the, the information leading up to the raid, I mean, I knew it would be a raid, but I didn\u2019t think anyone would get killed, especially not Fred, you know.\u201d O\u2019Neal\u2019s fate, which is revealed at the end of Judas and the Black Messiah<\/em>, is all the more dramatic after watching this footage.<\/p>\n

Given the expressionlessness displayed by the real-life O\u2019Neal, which must have been one of his key assets while working as an FBI informant, it\u2019s rather strange how Stanfield plays him as a desperate, erratic figure, inclined toward emoting and overreaction. He\u2019s introduced committing a robbery by impersonating an FBI agent in order to \u201cconfiscate\u201d a car, wearing a trench coat and fedora and behaving in such an uneasy manner that he fails to convince anyone. Other scenes convey such naked, conflicted emotion about what he\u2019s being forced to do that it\u2019s hard to believe O\u2019Neal wouldn\u2019t have been readily discovered as a rat.<\/p>\n

When O\u2019Neal offers Hampton the drink that is heavily drugged in order to make sure Hampton is easy prey for the FBI team sent to kill him (something that real-life O\u2019Neal denies having done), Stanfield plays O\u2019Neal as shaking visibly, with tears clearly in his eyes. Who among the Black Panthers, by then highly aware of the presence of informants in their midst, would take that drink offered by a crying, quaking man?<\/p>\n

In real-life, O\u2019Neal was such a hard case that the Lucas Brothers decided<\/a> early on that his more brutal acts would have to be censored in order to keep viewers\u2019 sympathy:<\/p>\n

Rather than depict O\u2019Neal torturing a Black Panther, ostensibly to weed out a rat, the writers include a separate informant placed in another chapter of the Panthers who tortures an innocent person to burnish his own credibility. It\u2019s a have-your-cake-and-eat-it solution that accurately portrays the despicable carnage the FBI unleashed on the Panthers, while possibly keeping the audience from fully despising O\u2019Neal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As canny as the filmmakers’ choices may have been in getting Judas and the Black Messiah<\/em> to the screen, it still feels like a project formulated to appease both the Hollywood executives who dismissed Fred Hampton as a worthy subject and audiences who demand \u201clikable\u201d main characters, unable or unwilling to deal with the brutality of a society that created the real William O\u2019Neal. It\u2019s enough to make you despair \u2014 the endless childhood of America, and the baby steps toward any serious reckoning with our history or shared reality.<\/p>\n

But, looking on the bright side, this film represents one small step in the right direction, flaws and all. And that\u2019s worth something.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Judas and the Black Messiah is a confounding film. I might be the only one who thinks so, as unqualified praise pours in from everywhere. Critically lauded, nominated for major awards, and no doubt a good primer on Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers, Judas and the Black Messiah nevertheless seems to me an uneasy [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1911,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47790"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1911"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47790"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47791,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47790\/revisions\/47791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}