PREMIERE'S REVIEW (posted 12/20/07)

You'd be hard-pressed to find a better-intentioned film among all the releases of 2007 than The Great Debaters, Denzel Washington's second directorial effort. Hardly a surprise, as megastar Washington's first film as a director, 2002's Antwone Fisher, was a fact-based, meant-to-inspire tale of redemptive triumph as well. But while The Great Debaters' intentions don't lead it to movie hell, this picture is far more diffuse, commonplace, and predictable than the surprisingly convincing Fisher.

Debaters tells the story of the all-black Wiley College's stellar debate team of the 1930s, which famously took on Harvard and won. Wiley was an outpost of African-American hope and erudition in the Jim Crow South, situated in Marshall, Texas. The picture's opening scenes draw an intriguing contrast between the bucolic, idyllic environs of the campus and the somewhat rawer pleasure of a rowdy, swinging roadhouse deep in the woods; it's in the latter setting that brilliant-but-troubled Wiley student Henry Lowe (Parker) has a fateful surprise encounter with professor and head of the debate team Melvin B. Tolson (Washington). Tolson's fascinating double life — he's also an undercover union organizer and poet, so maybe it's a quadruple life — leads to some not-unexpected plot complications as the film moves on, but at first it merely establishes a contrast with the mien of James Farmer Sr. (Forest Whitaker), Wiley's theology chair and strict but loving father of precocious 14-year-old James Jr., (Denzel Whitaker, no relation), another debater. James Jr.'s awkward social situation becomes even more awkward once the debate team accepts a female member, Samantha (Smollett), who's a more likely conquest for Henry than she is for the slight, bookish, eager James Jr.

This romantic subplot did not figure in the real story of the Wiley debate team. Although all of its characters are based on actual persons, screenwriter Robert Eisele (working from a story by himself and Jeffrey Porro) does quite a bit of concocting here, the better to enhance the, shall we say, "movieness" of the story. Nothing wrong with that, on principle, except that the embellishments tend instead to enhance the triteness of the story as our heroes advance with standard inexorability to a bittersweet triumph. Which isn't to say the picture's not without both its moments and a good amount of backbone. It's terrifically acted, pretty much a given with this cast. And Tolson's speeches about the nature of slavery, both physical and mental, one of which climaxes with his assertion that as a teacher he wants to get his students to "find, take back, and keep [their] righteous mind[s]," are pretty satisfyingly righteous. As is the picture's don't-give-an-inch-to-white-piety treatment of Tolson's supposed "communism."

— Glenn Kenny