In the bio-doc Sidney, the movie star’s individualism has to vie with the fashionable miscreant–martyr stereotype.
In this era when statues are erected to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and a Staten Island street is named after Eric Garner, Sidney Poitier’s accomplishment as Hollywood’s first great non-stereotyped black movie star seems underappreciated. Poitier never inspired the self-pity that sparks riots, so we’re unlikely to see statues to commemorate his cultural stature.
Oprah Winfrey has crafted an effigy of Poitier by producing the documentary Sidney, a two-hour collection of clips and interviews directed by Reginald Hudlin (House Party, Boomerang), that bestows on the late actor the same questionable, racially limited status accorded to Floyd, Taylor, and Garner, miscreants worshiped as martyrs.
Six minutes in, Oprah introduces “the concept of race,” turning Poitier into a political monument. He’s memorialized as an artist-activist and significant only for that. The doc is angled toward how Oprah wants us to see Poitier and herself.
Fact is, Poitier’s movies are his biography as well as his legacy: A Raisin in the Sun, The Defiant Ones, Band of Angels, Blackboard Jungle, No Way Out, Lilies of the Field, Something of Value, Edge of the City, Porgy and Bess, Paris Blues, A Patch of Blue, and during 1967, his annus mirabilis, Poitier starred in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, To Sir, with Love, and In the Heat of the Night, three hits that made him Hollywood’s No. 1 box-office figure. These films parallel America’s (and the world’s) race-conscious advances, although they’re mostly forgotten during the current exploitation of race — Blaxploitation — for political effect.
At the peak of his renown, Poitier scolded a reporter who took the same belittling approach: “I am an artist, man, American, contemporary, I am an awful lot of things, so I wish that you would pay me the respect due.” Yet Sidney (the overly familiar first-name-basis title tips off Oprah’s personal prerogative) uses Poitier’s life story — from the Bahamas to Hollywood — solely for its racial meaning. Oprah, Hudlin, screenwriter Jesse James Miller, and biographer Aram Goudsouzian maintain the PBS-style race-based routine, similar to Obama raiding the Actors Equity rolls to hand out Presidential Medals of Freedom. (That ribbon being hung around Poitier’s neck in 2009 provides the de rigueur Obama clip.)
Poitier himself appears in several on-camera testimonies. Wearing an elegant pale-pink shirt and gray suit jacket, he addresses the camera like an old friend: “My folks were tomato farmers. Everything I knew in terms of values, right and wrong, who I was value-wise, had to come from my parents. I would behave as close to that as I could because I could see the results of their behavior.” He’s aged, dignified, and charming, unlike modern celebrities who admit no heritage, just craven loyalty to fame and success.
From the time of his first appearance in his first film, No Way Out (1950), when a natural movie star emerges on screen, Poitier never discussed the significance of his breakthrough, other than to calmly explain, “There was a habit-pattern of utilizing black folks in the most disrespectful way.” Through him that pattern was broken. But the doc takes a glass-ceiling perspective, with no aesthetic appreciation. (A shot of feeble, near-death Poitier holding his autobiography This Life is the most context we get.) Otherwise, it’s a repeat of the Oprah Winfrey show: Celebrity guests (Spike Lee, Morgan Freeman, Quincy Jones, Lenny Kravitz, Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand); each of Poitier’s five daughters; the first of his two wives, Juanita (black and still angry); and his second wife, Joanna Shimkus (white and conspicuously held off-screen until the doc is almost over).
The cavalcade of icons doesn’t tell us what Poitier means. Significance comes via fame; it’s the dubious Oprah/Obama tribal status — what used to be known as fan-magazine popularity, not achievement. Only the late critic Greg Tate offers the helpful political paradigm of communist activist Paul Robeson as “a dual template for Poitier and [colleague Harry] Belafonte: Which side will you fight on?”
Oprah and Hudlin resort to simplistic, fashionable race grievance (not the only way to consider civil rights of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s) because Poitier himself does not fit today’s insipid actor-activist mold. A 1967 New York Times article prompted the “Sidney Poitier syndrome” when it asked, “Why does white America love Sidney Poitier so?” And the ironic, shameful moment of James Baldwin’s attack on his crowning achievement (the interracial-marriage comedy Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) is met with Poitier’s humility: “I have no reaction to that. It was a revolutionary film.”
This clash, where personal valor meets social opprobrium, is too complex for Oprah and Hudlin, especially when black celebrityhood (whether John Legend or Dave Chappelle, Kanye West or Kyrie Irving) thrives on the media’s approval. So Oprah falls back on her girlhood fascination with Poitier’s Oscar win: “Can you imagine the shock in that room?” No, not among the Sixties Hollywood liberals who voted for Poitier’s Oscar. Oprah enthuses, “Something utterly divine happening in that moment that surpassed everything else that was happening in the culture. . . . He was the great black hope for me. I remember distinctly thinking if this could happen to a colored man, what could happen to me?”
What happened, decades later, was Poitier’s appearance on Oprah’s talk show where she adamantly rejected his feelings that his career benefited from “luck.” Now Lenny Kravitz confirms the messianic myth: “He came to create change,” as if Poitier was Christ, or at most, Obama.
After emigrating from the Bahamas, Poitier realized, as he relates, that “in a matter of months I had to switch my whole view of life. I learned about power and who had the application of that power.” It’s not the typical grievance brandished by celebrities, including Oprah and Belafonte, who’s seen telling Dick Cavett, “I’ve done reasonably well and I am bitter.” Poitier’s a diffident movie star who refused to reveal himself. He discovered acting as protective self-expression: “I could be an exhibition, pour out my frustrations. I could retaliate.” That was his fight, his dignity, and his undefeated humility — an enigma that Oprah, in an era devoted to preaching diversity-equity-inclusion, cannot crack. It’s why he could forfeit his Hollywood eminence and pursue success as a director of mediocre salt-and-pepper buddy comedies with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.
Sidney glosses talent, work ethic, social progress, and spiritual faith so that Oprah can sucker her factions: “That’s what it’s all about, allowing people to see the humanity of us.” She’s in self-righteous demagogue mode. (“I am a great part of his legacy and so is every other person whose life he touched. Hmm? A Negro would do that?”) It’s a singular moment of Blaxploitation. Then Oprah actually boo-hoos: “I really love him so much.” Unable to accept Poitier’s individualism (“My integrity was more important than politics”), she upstages the documentary’s star.