The Navy’s first black aviator, shrunken into victimhood
Elizabeth Taylor (played by Serinda Swan) makes a surprise appearance in the military movie Devotion and gives it necessary context. Taylor, shown as a raven-haired, perfectly tanned world-famous young starlet enjoying nightlife at the 1950 Cannes Film Festival, turns her attention to a group of American naval pilots on shore leave — especially the black ensign Jesse Brown (Jonathan Majors). Taylor flashes her movie-star smile and flirts, “I didn’t know they let colored people fly planes. How enlightened!” It’s noblesse oblige — a thousand-watt sign of Hollywood approval, her sparkling, violet eyes and chirpy voice inspiring America’s moral and social advancement.
Everything else in Devotion is a peculiar letdown. It’s not Taylor’s biopic but an apprehensive account of Ensign Brown’s troubles as the U.S. Navy’s first black aviator deployed in the Korean War. (The Tuskegee Airmen had formed the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477 Bomber Group of the U.S. Air Force during World War II.) Director J. D. Dillard and screenwriters Jake Crane and Jonathan Stewart treat Brown’s breakthrough as if making the second bill to Top Gun: Maverick. But Devotion — despite that title — does not offer Maverick’s patriotic uplift. It’s stuck between uncovering Brown’s victimization and deflating American valor.
Devotion constantly contradicts itself. Told from the perspective of white pilot Tom Hudner (Glen Powell), it educates the audience on black struggle. Hudner was Brown’s wingman, but the men’s professional comradeship is almost adversarial. Powell played the grinning overconfident Wasp of Top Gun: Maverick, but he can’t out-smile an Elizabeth Taylor archetype, and Hudner can’t quite win Brown’s friendship. Brown’s mastery of high-school French helps Hudner woo a couple of jeunes filles by lending his wings medal. (“My C.O. refused to pin them on me during graduation, so they’re not that sentimental,” Brown says.)
This military brotherhood (“We bring everyone home”) teeters between the Millennial beer-commercial ideal and the specter of racism that haunts Brown. Hudner never guesses Brown’s suffering until a misunderstanding provokes an anguished confession: “You know how tired I am of people trying to help me while looking down on me?”
The big reveal in Devotion comes when Brown confides his private misery to Hudner and to us. We’re hit with an invective that Hudner had previously overheard but didn’t understand. Looking at a mirror in a probing close-up, Brown grins, breaks down to a grimace, then a teary outburst: “You ain’t shit. You ain’t never landing that plane, n*****. Boy! Your monkey ass shouldn’t even be flying.”
Brown’s confession is intended to shock, but it causes the movie to implode.
It’s followed by a monologue revealing the self-pity the filmmakers were trying to avoid. Brown recalls,
The swim test in flight school, they made me do it ten times. They didn’t believe a n***** could swim. They put ice in the water. Put weights in my flight suit. Held me under. They wouldn’t have cared if I died in that pool, but every time I made it out.
Back in 1999, I dissected a similar monologue in Instinct where Cuba Gooding Jr. played a black psychiatrist assigned to analyze a white anthropologist (Anthony Hopkins) gone rogue in the jungles of Africa. Gooding tearfully articulated his career sacrifices and self-denial — a reversal of the revenge instincts acted out by Hopkins’s white professional. That psychological thriller was Hollywood’s old way of representing black self-esteem; Devotion shows the current, post–George Floyd condescension.
The real-life Jesse Brown is imagined as a psychological wreck. “Every hateful word anyone’s ever said to me, I wrote it down. Repeat it to myself. Been doing it ever since I was a boy. It helps.” But it only helps the media and politicians patronize black American pathology. Devotion deprives Brown of the intellectual and patriotic pride that motivates military professionals (alluded to briefly in flashbacks of Brown with his kindly, long-suffering wife).
It is Jonathan Major’s misfortune that his broad-nosed resemblance to George Floyd plays into Hollywood’s racist condescension. Brown’s internalized self-hatred and abuse — and his eventual demise — go against any efforts at memorialization or heroism. Majors looks dashing in dress whites, and he does the mirror monologue with emotional aplomb. He could be the movie star that John Boyega failed to be and that Hollywood pretends it saw in Chadwick Boseman. But the pathetic, self-destructive victimhood assigned to Jesse Brown is unworthy of Major’s potential.
Despite the popularity of Top Gun: Maverick, the makers of Devotion begrudge military service. We’re asked to believe that Jesse Brown had no spiritual compass to go by — not Booker T. Washington, not Doris Miller (played by Cuba Gooding in Pearl Harbor) not Walter White, not Jackie Robinson, not Joe Louis, not even Elizabeth Taylor.
