The writing of author and activist James Baldwin (1924 – 1987) blew my mind when I was young and continues to strongly affect my world view in the periodic re-readings I do of his work. Most recently I revisited Another Country, an incredibly passionate novel based on his time in France that explores gay, bi, and straight sexuality with a candor that is hard to believe for 1962. But he had already published Giovanni’s Room (1956), to me one of the most elegantly written, beautiful, and courageous gay novels we have.
As a lifelong fan, I am so thrilled that filmmaker Raoul Peck was able to take the 30 pages of the unfinished book Baldwin was working on and turn it into the film I Am Not Your Negro. In the just-started book Remember This House, Baldwin wanted to give his personal perspective on the lives and the murders of three crucial black leaders, all of them dear friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.
What is astonishing about I Am Not Your Negro, is that every word of the script is written or spoken by James Baldwin. Either Peck uses clips from numerous interviews and speeches, or the single cast member, Samuel L. Jackson, reads the writer’s own words with restrained power, off-camera.
We follow Baldwin’s own expanding understanding and come to understand how, at age 24, the combination of racism and homophobia drove him to live in France and how the images of a lone teenager attempting to attend a white high school drew him back to the fight in the States in 1957. We see scenes of vile racism, clips of the Civil Rights Movement, and footage of the vicious reaction of the officials and police.
There are few voices more iconic and prescient than that of James Baldwin, as the multi-award-winning I Am Not Your Negro shows us so clearly. It is a film that I most highly recommend and plan to see again. But there is a gaping hole, an elephant in the room, a strange silence about Baldwin’s own love of men. His homosexuality was so fundamental to his perceptions and his literature that it is puzzling that the film only made references once or twice that were so oblique that few would pick up on them. It is a brilliant film about a beloved historical figure, but the film remains closeted – as Baldwin refused to do.
Because you and I have bigger things to worry about, I have kept my list of the crimes of the film La La Land to just 10. I present them here in no particular order, although some are more egregious than others.
The film uses Black people as props, mainly as jazz musicians whose music we can hear but who have no spoken lines. The exception is John Legend, but then he is more famous and popular than the stars themselves. (The casting director also has about two sentences of speech.) Ryan Gosling’s character feels justified in grabbing a woman of color on the street and dancing with her to the distress of her husband. After all, this white man is about to save jazz and its history.
Emma Stone’s character dumps her dear women friends and roommates the minute she gets a man and we don’t see them again until they turn up loyally to her sparsely attended one-woman show.
Neither Stone nor Gosling can dance or sing. This is a musical and we must suffer their squeaks and stumbles throughout. The only real dancing is a tiny couple in silhouette, clearly “stunt” people.
There isn’t a shred of attraction or passion between the lovers. Even in bed they remain dressed. They barely touch. They never sizzle. They only get a bit excited when they’re talking about their ambitions.
They’re privileged and self-absorbed. They’re supposed to be impoverished unemployed artists, but she drives a Prius, and they never mention money or worry about it. Their only concerns have to do with becoming rich and famous.
Their cell phones only seem to work one way: incoming calls. They are frequently interrupted by their ringing cell phones, but when she’s not going to make it to their first date and when he’s going to miss her opening night, they don’t call. He drives uninvited to another state to deliver a third party phone message to her.
Nothing in this film evokes the brilliant musicals of decades gone by.
The special effects are annoying. They’re not very special and they go on and on.
The dual ending seems like a focus-group quandary and a cheap solution for a director/writer (Damien Chazelle) in way over his head. As my friend observes, the director lacks the confidence of his storytelling.
The biggest crime? The film is excruciatingly boring. Who gives a fuck about these people and their drippy problems?
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