Race celebrates Jesse Owens and Leni Riefenstahl.
Burt Lancaster’s virile example of earnestness, drive, and pure vitality in 1951’s Jim Thorpe–All-American inspired so much admiration — and identification — that one felt an emotional wallop as the bio-pic dramatized Thorpe’s heartbreak when racist opposition (including the arbitrary rescinding of his Olympic medals) caused setbacks in his career and life. This was before racism had become commoditized as a routine Hollywood marketing tool, and so its offense could be shown more clearly without extra moralizing. This was also when the irony of the Irish-American Lancaster portraying the Native American Thorpe showed sincerity. Rather than making a point of political correctness or patronization, Lancaster’s portrayal was an example of artistic and athletic reparation. It ultimately can be seen as an acknowledgment of Thorpe’s national legacy.
This Hollywood recall is triggered by the new bio-pic about Olympic legend Jesse Owens, which for nuisance reasons is not titled Jesse Owens–All-American, as perhaps it should have been, befitting the Jim Thorpe paradigm. Instead, it’s titled Race. The film doesn’t much utilize the implied double meaning; the title just sits there — as a generic label.
The first half of Race is desultory: A black sharecropper’s son (his Southern accent caused his initials, “J.C.,” to be misunderstood as “Jesse”) pursues his opportunity at Ohio State University, where he shows his athletic prowess by breaking three track-and-field world records and surmounting routine social prejudice. Opposing racism seems the least interesting (though now obligatory) aspect of this phase of Owens’s story. Depredations of the Jim Crow era are less focused than in the James Brown bio-pic Get On Up. Director Stephen Hopkins’s unexceptional direction is so low key it dulls the relationship between Owens (played by Stephan James) and his white coach/mentor Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis), who negotiate the tensions of authority, caste, and sportsmanship with race barely being mentioned. (A locker-room scene of Snyder shouting above bigoted white jocks — drowning out the noise of racism to focus on Owens’s goal — makes a neat point, but needed better handling.)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=E31LnSw47xo%3Frel%3D0
Like most recent black bio-pics (from Red Tails to Selma), Race suffers from what Harvey Weinstein called “The Obama Effect,” by which it’s difficult to tell if black experience is being accepted or patronized or if the protagonists are simply lionized for being celebrities. Prior to the Obama Effect, a movie like Jim Thorpe–All-American could subsume that quandary within its deeper, richer understanding of America’s racial complexity. Race gets interesting only when it expands beyond Owens’s struggle.
There’s complex, fascinating movie history inside Race’s politically correct pabulum.
At the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, two other characters come into focus: Olympics administrator Avery Brundage (Jeremy Irons) and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houten, who plays Melisandre in HBO’s Game of Thrones). Screenwriters Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse layer Brundage and Riefenstahl’s controversial business collaborations with the Nazi regime for a fresh perspective on the ’36 Olympics as something more than an event symbolizing the defeat of Nazi Germany’s self-image. The filmmakers distinguish themselves by extolling Owens’s astonishing performance (he won four gold medals), Brundage’s diplomacy, and Riefenstahl’s artistry as triumphs over much more than racism.
When two Jewish-American athletes brandish their Star of David pendants before Nazi guards while Owens and another black athlete walk past behind the Nazis, the shrewdly complicated maneuvering of pride, nerve, and ingenuity becomes a fresh political game. During a showdown between Brundage and Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (Barnaby Metschurat), Riefenstahl is caught in the middle. “Do you want me to translate or interpret?” she asks her obstreperous boss. That question gets to the heart of the ongoing Riefenstahl controversy. Van Houten’s brainy, energetic characterization equals James’s handsome, youthful interpretation of Owens. Who expected a politically incorrect heroine in a movie that ostensibly congratulates conventional political correctness?
#related#It’s not likely that Hollywood filmmakers would be so daring. European producers Luc Dayan and Jean-Charles Levy brave a more forthright perspective. (Their end-credits note that Owens’s victory was never acknowledged by FDR’s White House.) The visionary poetry of Riefenstahl’s record of the Berlin games, Olympia (1938), seems the inspiration for Hopkins’s fable-like vistas of the Berlin stadium (he scales Owens’s silhouette against the vast crowd). Riefenstahl’s legacy continues in scenes where she fights Goebbels to achieve her art; this helps to complicate how we think about her legacy. When the German broad-jumper Carl “Luz” Long (David Kross) aids Owens, an observer warns, “He’s throwing away his career.” Yet Riefenstahl smiles: “But he is making my film!” Similarly, van Houten’s Riefenstahl is the making of Race. However ironic that sounds, it boldly upholds the same cultural principles that most politically correct movies profess yet demonstrate so weakly.
The first half of Race is predicated on patronizing Owens: “The American people need champions to remind them what they’re capable of.” But that’s just another form of propaganda. There’s complex, fascinating movie history inside Race’s politically correct pabulum.
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Movie history also distinguishes Fatih Akin’s The Cut. Turkey’s 1915 Armenian genocide is personalized into a Dr. Zhivago–like epic about a young Armenian Catholic, Nazaret (Tahar Rahim). His vocal chords are cut by Ottoman soldiers, and he is separated from his wife and twin daughters; we follow him through his years-long search to find them. Akin’s grave tale of a people’s tragedy and ingrained suffering acknowledges awareness of man’s-global-inhumanity-to-man. This is felt most sharply after the war, when Nazaret, in a refugee camp, attends an outdoor screening of Chaplin’s The Kid (1921). The universality of Chaplin’s poem of devotion and silent-movie plea for loving kindness is not just ironic; it distills Akin’s ambition to illustrate, through silent-movie purity and force, what mankind still needs to learn. Rahim’s youthful expressiveness (even when he finally removes his headgear and reveals aged gray hair) makes him an eternal figure of indomitability. His yearning — and Akin’s art — would do Chaplin proud.