The Great Debaters

“The Great Debaters,” released in 2007, is about an underdog debate team that wins a national championship, and some critics have complained that it follows the formula of all sports movies by leading up, through great difficulty, to a victory at the end. And what do you know, it does. How many sports movies, or movies about underdogs competing in any way, have you seen that end in a loss? It is human nature to seek inspiration in victory, and this is a film that is insisting and inspiring and re-creates the stories of a remarkable team and their coach.

The team is from a small college in Marshall, Texas, Wiley College, a black organization in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s. The school’s English professor, Melvin Tolson, played by Denzel Washington, is a taskmaster who demands really high from his debate team, but the movie is about more than that, and in ways that do not follow the traditional formulas.

For instance, there are Tolson’s secret lives. Wearing overalls and work boots, he ventures out in disguise as an organizer for a national sharecropper’s union. He’s a dangerous radical, local whites believe: probably a communist. But he’s organizing poor whites and blacks, whose enslavement is equal.

He keeps his politics out of the classroom, however, where he hides a different kind of secret: He is one of America’s leading poets. Although the move barely goes into detail on it, Tolson published long poems in such magazines as the Atlantic Monthly and in 1947 he was actually named poet laureate of Liberia. It’s ironic that his role as the coach for this debate team would win him greater fame today.

He holds difficult auditions and selects four team members: Henry Lowe (Nate Parker), who drinks and flirts with women; Hamilton Burgess (Jermaine Williams), a superb debater; James Farmer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker), a bright 14-year-old who is their researcher; and Samantha Booke (Jurnee Smollett), the substitute, and the only female debater they’ve heard of. Tolson drills them, disciplines them, counsels them and leads them to a string of victories that finishes a victory of Harvard, the national champion.

We get a good sense of the livelihood black community that has made these students, in particular James Farmer Sr., played by the beloved Forest Whitaker, a preacher. (Denzel Whitaker, who plays the son, is not related to Forest Whitaker, and not named after Denzel Washington). James Jr. would go on to find the Congress of Racial Equality.

Tolson drives his team on long road trips to out-of-town debates, and one night traveling late, they have a really emotional experience in the film: They run into a place where a white mob has just lynched a black man and set his body on fire. They barely escape by the skin of their teeth. And daily life for them is full with racist danger; especially for Tolson, who has been singled out by the local sheriff, played by John Heard, as a rabble-rouser. These experiences inform their debates as much as formal research.

The movie is not really about how this team defeats the national champions. It is more about how its members, its coach, its school and community believe that an education is their best way out of the mess of racism and discrimination. They would never think that in the future, serious black students would be criticized by jealous colleagues for “acting white.” They’re black, proud, single-minded, focused, and they express all of this really dramatically in their debating.

The debates themselves have one habit: The Wiley team somehow draws the “good” side of every question. Since debaters are supposed to defend whatever position they are fighting, whatever position they draw, it might have been interesting to see them defend something they disbelieve, even hate. The late Roger Ebert admits, “Still, I suppose I understand why that isn’t don here; it would have interrupted the flow. And the blow becomes a mighty flood in a powerful and impassioned story.” This is one of 2007’s best films.

Here’s a special note: In fact, the real Wiley team did beat the national champions, but from USC, not Harvard. Co-writer Robert Eisele explains, “In that era, there was much at stake when a black college debated any white school, particularly one with the stature of Harvard. We used Harvard to demonstrate the heights they achieved.”

In the end, you should definitely check this movie out. It suits for this month, and is very inspirational. I saw this last spring semester in a Rhetoric class that I was taking, which is odd, but we spend an entire week watching this movie, and it was worth it. If you get the chance to watch this, do so, I think you’ll love it.

Thank you for joining in on my “Black History Month Movie Reviews.” Stay tuned for more of my movie reviews coming soon. I’ll catch you later.