Popular Medium - Freedom Road, The Killing Floor, & The Human Stain
An unintentionally perfect triple-feature
My ongoing retrospective project for 2021 is to watch as many films as I can find streaming for several different Hollywood actors, all of them women, and all first-time watches for me. I have a few different reasons for this, but there have been a lot of things that have come out of it that I didn’t plan on or anticipate. One of those things happened yesterday, which is also something that happens every so often in my life when I watch more than one film in a day: an inadvertently themed mini-marathon. As I wrote each of these reviews it became clearer and clearer that there was a theme happening, and by the time I got to the third film, it was extremely evident. Instead of breaking that down further, I’ve decided to share each of the reviews here in the order they were written so you can get a feel for the narrative that was forming. I also want to say that I can recommend all of these films in their own way, but none of them are easy watches in their own ways either.
Freedom Road (1979) This is for the feature film-length version currently available on Tubi, not the full 3-plus hours long miniseries that originally aired in 1979. It definitely suffers from being essentially cut in half, with some odd choices on what to focus on and what to omit (I'm assuming) but you still get the gist of it. Muhammad Ali makes his acting debut in a role he clearly saw as an analog for his own struggles. Based on a 1944 novel that was steeped in its own fight against the McCarthy era during the early attempts to get it adapted in the 50s, this rare Reconstruction story finally found some footing after the success of the Roots miniseries. Ali's involvement helped it overcome the final hurdles even if his particular performance isn't the most gripping. But he's a boxer and an activist, not an actor. While it suffers from the usual quality issues that any made-for-TV project does, especially at the time and despite its sizable $7.5 million budget, it still stands as one of the few pieces of popular media to explore the postbellum era in such a way. Freed Blacks struggle alongside working-class whites against a system created to subjugate and control them while the ruling class sit in their posh homes, discuss how to stop the march of progress, and the KKK executes its usual campaign of violence, fear, and intimidation in service of that. None of this feels particularly new or groundbreaking now, but at the time there wasn't anything quite like it and it suffered for that. Far from a classic -- the script is unbalanced and Czech director Jan Kadar's last effort mirrors that imbalance -- it's nonetheless of note for what it did at the time and what it heralded as a possibility going forward.
The Killing Floor (1984) I've known Bill Duke's acting work for years and never seen a single one of his directorial efforts until now. His first film was a PBS made-for-TV special that was supposed to herald the beginning of ten films commissioned to commemorate workers in the US that never came to be; this was to be the only one made. The folks involved in writing the script did extensive research on Chicago during the early 1900s and based the main characters on the real people involved with the unions in the stockyards. Duke uses archival footage mixed with the scenes he shot to create a sense of time and place, and the voiceover of the main character helps to give it even more of a documentary feel. It's still a narrative piece though, following Damien Leake's Frank Custer as he works his way through jobs, unions, and people before, during, and after both World War I and the Chicago Race Riot of 1919. It's a lot to take on for a first picture, but Duke does fine work. The help of so many unions in Chicago and the filmmaking industry, both financially and artistically, really helps it shine as well. It even was made during a bit of a fraught and historic time in its own right, as Reagan's union-busting of air traffic controllers and Chicago's election of its first Black mayor were happening during the same time. I just so happened to have watched this right after Freedom Road and they compliment each other well. Where that film follows recently emancipated Blacks joining with working-class whites to try and gain footing against the ruling classes during Reconstruction, this is about southern Blacks working with Polish union members to create safer and more rewarding work environments for everyone during a time when jobs vacillated from plentiful to scarce. A powerful and impactful pairing.
The Human Stain (2003) Today I made the decision to look at my All Time stats for release year and try to fill in a dip from my watchlist. For some reason 2003 is decidedly low and looking at my options at least partially explained why. Not a lot in general, and not a lot that grabbed me. This one benefited from an intriguing title and a promising cast list, topped by Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman. Other than that, I went in totally blind.
Spoilers for a nearly 20-year-old film from here on out.
It ended up being the third of an inadvertently tonally matched triple feature for my day. Freedom Road — a story about Black and white farmers banding together against the KKK during the Reconstruction Era — and The Killing Floor — an account of Black and white union workers banding together to overcome the Chicago Race Riots of 1919 — made up the first two. There was just no way to know what I was getting myself into with this one, despite all the “bad casting” non-spoiler reviews I read.
While I take issue with saying Kidman was poorly placed as the working-class woman with a dark past that academic Hopkins falls for, I immediately thought I saw what the issue was with his casting. After all, for all his strengths and all the times he has been cast as someone from the US he’s never really seemed to make more than a passing attempt at an accent that wasn’t already his. That is very much the case here, and so I thought that was what so many people were having an issue with.
As the story unfolded, and the big reveal hits like a velvet hammer, I realized why folks were crying foul. I’m not entirely sure there’s any way to cast this role without causing some form of a stir, but then it’s a stirring bit of a plot point when your lead is a Black man who has been passing as a white Jewish man and living a lie for a huge chunk of his life. It’s certainly interesting to watch an 18-year-old film based on a 21-year-old book about incidents that take place during the late 1990s when the Clinton/Lewinsky story broke address the supposed dangers of what was then called political correctness but would now be more about cancel culture.
I’ll leave the crux of the story and some of the twisty bits alone since this has turned into more of a peek at the different ways race has influenced art throughout US history. Something I’ll probably dive at least a bit more into outside the confines of a film review site. Still, I had to acknowledge how this strange triumvirate came into being today, and at least jot down all these swirling thoughts right after finishing the last of them. I love and am deeply fascinated by how this consistently happens to me without any real planning or forethought.
I will close with saying that despite its deeply problematic casting, this is actually a pretty compelling narrative that, if nothing else, has made me quite interested in the novel which I’d assume does a more thorough job of examining. And probably gives Kidman’s character a bit more dimension than this script does.