Team colors: film explores racial divide in 1930s America.(The Great Debaters )(Movie review)

As reviewed by David Steiner

The Great Debaters Viewed May 2008

In the 1930s, an all-black debate team from a small East Texas college defeated the all-white debate team of the University of Southern California (USC) in front of at least a thou sand people. The Wiley College team was trained by English professor Melvin Tolson and anchored by James Farmer Jr., later founder of the Congress of Racial Equality. Take a little poetic license to replace USC with Harvard, and you have a classic David-defeats-Goliath tale that is Denzel Washing ton's movie The Great Debaters.

Even this wordy summary, however, fails to give you the measure of the film: James Jr. was 14 years old at the time of the great debate and something of a child prodigy; his father, a minister and son of a slave, was the first African American to earn a doctorate in the state of Texas. Tolson became an important poet (best known for his work "Harlem Gallery," a meditation on black America and the nature of art) and a courageous organizer of farm laborers across the color line. And that's just the start: throw in the movie's powerful reminders of brutal racism (a showdown over a run-over hog has one riveted, a lynching becomes all the more powerful for its indirection), a love story, a meditation on the universality of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, a paean to the dreams education makes possible, a debate about Jesus as radical social reformer, and you begin to get the whole picture.

Denzel Washington as Tolson and Forest Whitaker as Dr. James Farmer Sr. give strong performances, no more so than in a brief theological fencing match on the lessons of Jesus that is the memorable debate of the movie. The shimmering fury that underpins the direction and acting of the racially charged scenes scrapes the psyche of the viewer and alone is enough to recommend the film.

Given the penumbral riches, both historical and invented, that dance around the core narrative of the film, the college debates themselves barely register: the positions are repeatedly stacked in favor of Wiley, the interactions of the team are merely sketched, and deeper pedagogical questions of lasting importance remain buried. As Wiley College's own account made clear (it seems to have been dropped from their website), Tolson wrote out all the speeches for his students, who then memorized them, and even provided rebuttals so his team would be fully prepared. Some would call that instruction in the art of plagiarism. But the movie only touches on the ethics of professorial authorship. The ...