Growing up in the 80 and 90s, many movies about the Civil Rights Movement and its time were a bit…biased. Many of them told stories of heroic white people in a way that marginalized the African Americans who did a lot of the hard work in actual history, suggesting that the only way black people got any justice in America at that time was because white people had sudden epiphanies. As such, it’s been rather refreshing as more black filmmakers have come along in recent years to tell their own stories, often showing that the times were more complex and the work isn’t done quite yet.
In that vein, HBO Max released Judas and the Black Messiah, the true story of Bill O’Neal’s infiltration of the Black Panther Party on behalf of the FBI.
The movie opens with a speech J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen) addressing a large group of his agents on what he sees as the greatest danger facing America at the time: the Black Panthers. Not the Russians or the Chinese, but the Black Panthers. He charges up his audience to bring them down, and if you know anything about J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, you know they were, to put it as nicely as possible, rather ruthless in their opposition to anything Hoover personally found offensive. These were people who had a file cabinet full of surveillance reports on Eleanor Roosevelt. It could only be worse for the Black Panthers.
Among the audience is Agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons). He seems intrigued. From there, we meet O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield) as he runs a scam impersonated federal agents in a scam to steal people’s cars. He’s caught, and Mitchell puts it to him straight: either help the FBI get some dirt on the Panthers’ inner circle, or go to prison for at least five years. Sure, there are some financial perks that can come O’Neal’s way, but it’s not like O’Neal seems to have much of a choice.
O’Neal’s top target for surveillance is Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), leader of the Chicago chapter of the Panthers. Hampton, a young and charismatic leader, is a special target for Hoover, and so he must be a real terror as he calls himself a revolutionary, right? Not at all. Yes, he calls himself a revolutionary, but he’s more about feeding the local hungry, getting kids a good education, reaching out to people of all races, and ending gang wars. Yes, his people are stockpiling weapons, but Hampton himself is more idealistic and less inclined to violence than some other characters in this movie. For Hampton, the enemy isn’t so much white people as it is the people in power who all happen to be white, best scene in a scene when Hampton addresses a group of lower income white people having a meeting in a room with a Confederate flag.
Now, anyone hoping to see O’Neal and Hampton have a lot of heady scenes from two up-and-coming young actors, particularly when Hampton learns what O’Neal is really doing…well, history had other ideas. Much of the movie is about what these two men do separately. They do interact, but not that much. Hampton is about sticking to his ideals no matter what happens to him, and O’Neal is trying to stay alive and out of jail because it turns out being a secret informant for a single FBI agent isn’t the safest of professions. Even Mitchell isn’t as on-top-of-things as he appears to be to O’Neal, seeing as how Mitchell seems to mostly see the Panthers as the equivalent of the Klan.
But that’s not what this movie is saying. It seems to be more about how the Panthers evolved from a community-level group out to improve the lives of African Americans in poor urban environments and morphed into a more militant organization, something that is very much caused by the interference of the police and the FBI. O’Neal’s growing guilt and Hampton’s idealism play off each other, suggesting that by opposing men like Hampton, law enforcement just made things more violent. Given the general perception of the Black Panther Party, it’s good to have a movie that shows its evolution to what it would become, and having a well-written, well-acted movie about that is another one of those views we might not have gotten 20 years or so ago.
Hey, remember when Forrest Gump apologized for ruining a Black Panther party? That’s the kind of stuff movies like this one are essentially up against.
Grade: A-
0 Comments