The Great Debaters

Year 18, Day 120 - 4/30/26 - Movie #5,317

BEFORE: It's the last day of another month, so here are my format stats for April: 

12 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Freedom Writers, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway, Burke and Hare, Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul., One Battle After Another, Knox Goes Away, Goodrich, The Alto Knights, The Comeback Trail, The Package, The Great Debaters

10 watched on Netflix: I Am Mother, Paddington in Peru, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, Jay Kelly, I Used to Be Famous, Jurassic World: Rebirth, iBoy, The Bad Guys 2, In Your Dreams, Atlas

1 watched on Amazon Prime: G20
3 watched on Hulu: Terminal, The Luckiest Man in America, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

1 watched on Roku: Sword of Trust

1 watched on Tubi: The Book of Love

28 TOTAL

I skipped three days, and that STILL feels like a full month, or at least it's fuller than last April, because we took a week off to go on a quick cruise. So I'm still a few films ahead in the count from where I was on April 30 last year. I'll post the links to Mother's Day tomorrow.

John Heard carries over from "The Package". 

THE PLOT: Based on the true story of Melvin B. Tolson, a professor at Wiley College in Texas. In 1935, he inspired students to form the school's first debate team, which went on to challenge the Harvard debate team, which had won the national championship. 

AFTER: I'd say this was a follow-up to "Freedom Writers", but it's not, really. The two films are set like 70 or so years apart - but I thought they sounded alike enough to put them on the same DVD, even though they share no actors in common. Oh, well. They're both kind of Oscar bait in the same way, right? 

"The Great Debaters" is set back in 1935, but in Texas, so yeah, long after the Civil War and the 13th Amendment, but still, you know, down South during the time of Jim Crow laws, so there was still plenty of racism and oppression to go around. Schools were still segregated, that's the bad news, but there were black colleges, I guess that's the good news. Blacks were technically full Americans on paper, but still treated like second-class citizens in many places. Still, that's an upgrade, right? JK. But a second-class citizen is still a citizen - but still, there are lynchings, so it's kind of a good news/bad news situation. 

Also, this was back when debating was still a popular thing - well, nobody had Playstations or Marvel Comics or IMAX movies yet, so sure, debating. Teams of four were given 48 hours to research a topic and were then told if they were arguing FOR it or AGAINST it, whatever "it" was. There really was a Wiley college, and as a black college it had a black debate team, only more bad news, the national competitions were still segregated. So yeah, a couple of things - this film has Wiley College invited to debate against Harvard's team, and the tagline says they challenged Harvard "in the national championship". No, that's wrong, in the movie Harvard's team was the national champion but since Wiley, as a black college, wasn't recognized in the competitions their debate was only an exhibition match, it did NOT decide the national championship. 

Also, in real life, the Wiley team faced the University of South Carolina, not Harvard, but USC was the national champion at the time. Again, it was an exhibition match only, the title was not on the line. The filmmakers decided that more movie viewers knew what Harvard was and what Harvard stands for (mostly white students, even in liberal Massachusetts...). Why the need to change the facts to try to make the story bigger? It's not enough that they faced USC and won, sorry, but reality doesn't fit the narrative you want to tell?  

There's a love triangle on the team, too - there are four members on the team, but Burgess kind of disappears early on with no explanation (did he graduate?) leaving three people, who form that love triangle. Henry hooks up with Samantha, but James Farmer Jr. (who entered college at 14, that's why he looks so young) is infatuated with Samantha, too, and is jealous of her being with Henry. Yeah, but Henry's probably 19 or 20, and that makes a difference... 

The implication here is that being on the debate team helped these college students find their voices and express themselves - James Farmer Jr. went on to become an activist who co-founded the Congress of Racial Equality, while debate coach Melvin Tolson went on to become a union organizer, poet, and politician after teaching at Wiley, which was located in Marshall, Texas, ironically called the last city to admit defeat in the Civil War. I'm not sure if that's a joke. But Tolson also got his Masters Degree at Columbia University, his thesis project was based on extensive interviews with members of the Harlem Renaissance. In his spare time, he apparently organized farm laborers and tenant farmers as this film depicts, and had associations with radical leftist movements (Communists, Socialists, Baptists...).

It's weird to say, but I think the film maybe placed too much emphasis on the college kids, Tolson sounds like he was the more interesting subject. This film's not really about him, but maybe it should have been?  A teacher with an Ivy-League education dresses down like a sharecropper to go run discussions with tenant farmers about how to form labor unions. Jeez, man, THERE is your movie, not debating the finer points of racism with students at a white college...I can't help but think that the filmmakers here missed out on a much more compelling subject, and he was right under their noses, the whole time.

Directed by Denzel Washington (director of "Fences" and producer of "The Piano Lesson")

Also starring Denzel Washington (last seen in "Much Ado About Nothing"), Nate Parker (last seen in "The Secret Life of Bees"), Jurnee Smollett (last seen in "Eve's Bayou"), Denzel Whitaker (last seen in "Warrior"), Jermaine Williams (last seen in "CHIPS"), Forest Whitaker (last seen in "Big George Foreman"), Gina Ravera (last seen in "Kiss the Girls"), Kimberly Elise (last seen in "Dope"), Devyn A. Tyler (last seen in "Unhinged"), Trenton McClain Boyd, Ritchie Montgomery (last seen in "Homefront"), Jackson Walker (last seen in "42"), Tim Parati (last seen in "Safe Haven"), Robert X. Golphin, Justice Leak (last seen in "Insurgent"), Glen Powell (last seen in "Hit Man"), Brad Watkins, Brian Smiar (last seen in "Regarding Henry"), Damien Leake (last seen in "He Said, She Said"), Stephen Rider (last seen in "The Host"), Donny Boaz, Bonnie Johnson (last seen in "Affairs of State"), Charissa Allen, Michael Beasley (last seen in "The Naked Gun"), Gary Mattis, George Wilson (last seen in "The Book of Love"), Fahnlohnee R. Harris (last seen in "Runaway Jury"), Harold Evans (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), JD Evermore (last seen in "Stop-Loss"), Sharon Jones (last seen in "The Wolf of Wall Street"), Kelvin Payton (last seen in "I Saw the Light"), Southey Blanton, Marcus Lyle Brown (last seen in "57 Seconds"),

RATING: 5 out of 10 quotes from Thoreau