Malcolm X is the textbook example of a one-timer that falls into that category merely for its daunting length.
Spike Lee's 1992 opus is three hours and 21 minutes long. When, in this busy world of ours, does it ever seem convenient to sit down and watch a 201-minute movie?
Oh, and this isn't a 201-minute movie like Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is a 201-minute movie. That's 201 minutes of magic, battles and apocalyptic madness. This is 201 minutes of racism, by both Blacks and whites.
But it's also 201 minutes of the most glorious filmmaking you will ever see.
But before I get to that, let me tell you how I did, indeed, set aside 201 minutes to watch Malcolm X: I watched it in about five sittings over three days.
This was not my intention. I intended to watch it all on Wednesday. My wife was in the city for the evening, so when I got home from work, I thought I could watch an hour of it before dinner and two hours and 21 minutes of it after. She'd be home by then, but she'd have already eaten and she wouldn't need to interface with me other than a quick "hello, how was your day."
But the thing that happens when your wife is in the city is that you have to do all the things related to your kids' dinner. Plus clean up some of the place that she didn't get to during the day, because that's only right.
So even in two sittings, if you want to call it that, before and after dinner, I was barely past the hour mark on the first day.
The second day wasn't much better. We went out for dinner for my sister-in-law's birthday, and she came over and hung out well before that. I might have only watched another 15 minutes all up that day.
Friday was when I knocked out the rest of it. For some reason I awoke at the ungodly hour of 5:45, so I got X down to less than an hour remaining before going to work that day. The last 40 minutes or so, I'm not ashamed to admit, I watched during my last two hours of the workday. It was a bit slow so I didn't feel too guilty about this. (I was working from home.)
And here was where purchasing the movie really came in handy. Having not found it on any of my streamers, I went to Apple to rent it, but the rental price ($5.99) was actually a dollar more than the purchase price. There are worse movies to own than my 97th ranked film on Flickchart, and this way, I didn't have to worry about how long it took me to finish it. I wasn't running up against a 48-hour expiration date for a rental.
But I was running up against the practical reality that I wouldn't allow myself to start another movie until I finished this one, and not a moment too soon, as I left work a few minutes early to see the movie I wrote about yesterday, I Want Your Sex. (Don't go checking that post if you actually want to learn anything about I Want Your Sex. I only wrote about a near disaster involving a can of Pepsi Max.)
I think one of the reasons I had put off seeing Malcolm X, which I loved when I saw it in the theater in 1992, before now was precisely what I alluded to with my comparison to Lord of the Rings: It wouldn't be "fun."
But you know what? When a movie is made with a sense of vigor, a sense of exploding cinematic conventions, a sense of letting the camera do whatever it wants to do -- like the senses with which Lee made X -- it is fun.
I don't really know where to start talking about the things I noted from this second viewing of Malcolm X, but let's at least start macro before going micro.
Is it possible this is the best biopic ever made?
I guess you'd have to ask what qualifies as a biopic in this discussion. Is Raging Bull a biopic? I guess it is. Personally, I'm not a huge Raging Bull fan, so it's no contest for me. But some biopics are more obviously biopicky than others, and I think among films you consider to be obvious biopics, Malcolm X is king.
That's not actually what my Flickchart says. Flickchart has five biopics ranked higher than this for me, but I would take issue with the categorization of any of these as pure biopics: The Passion of Joan of Arc, Bonnie and Clyde, The Social Network, Schindler's List and Goodfellas. Just because a movie is about a real person, I don't think that necessarily makes it a biopic. Especially if it's about someone who wouldn't otherwise be famous, as is the case in Goodfellas.
But among movies that are clearly about one particular person, especially by being named after them, and they consider this person from very early in their life until their death? Yeah, Malcolm X kicks any of those movies' asses.
One of the things I think this does so well is chart the changes in this man over time. It starts with the young Malcolm Little wearing zoot suits and swinging his arm in an affected way as he walks, alongside his director, which is one of my most lasting images of the film. During this time, the later proponent of racial segregation has an appetite for white women. It then continues with his life of crime and stint in prison, from which he emerges as a key figurehead in the Nation of Islam, in fact, such a key figure with so much press that he ends up alienating his fellow brothers. And by then it's too late too avoid his own assassination.
I skipped ahead there. But this is at least three different Malcolms we get in this movie, and Denzel Washington plays each as a distinct part of a recognizable whole. It's a masterful performance that might have won Washington an Oscar if he hadn't already gotten one for Glory (which is still due up in this series) just three years earlier, and if Al Pacino hadn't needed one that year for Scent of a Woman. (As if.)
But as much as this is Washington's film, and you can't imagine another person playing this role, you really can't imagine another person directing it than Lee. Which was a real possibility as this was originally a project for director Norman Jewison.
I had thought of this being an immediate successor to Do the Right Thing, my favorite Lee film that's on the outskirts of my top 20 on Flickchart. It isn't. He made both Mo' Better Blues and Jungle Fever in between. (Which I also liked and which I have also seen only once, Fever better than Blues though.)
But whether his last film was the masterful but insular DTRT, or the noble failure JF, in either case Malcolm X was a major step forward in terms of size and scope for its director. "Major" tends to understate the case. Probably no one had any idea if Lee would be capable of overseeing such a sprawling epic, one that had the audacity to shoot on location in Mecca for greater verisimilitude, one that covered several periods in U.S. history that were distinct even though they were only separated by two decades. No one had any idea until Lee did it and until he knocked everyone's socks off.
His indispensable collaborator in this effort was Ernest Dickerson, his cinematographer for each of his previous five features and then never again after this, I'm sorry to say. For the things I made note of during this viewing, I don't know whether to credit Lee or Dickerson, but I'm sure it was a combination of the two that's responsible for what ends up on screen.
I'll mention a couple scenes that particularly grabbed me in terms of the camerawork.
The first is also a showcase for Washington. When Malcolm is serving a term in solitary confinement -- or "the hole," in the parlance of The Shawshank Redemption -- there's a shot where a small shaft of light opens at both the bottom and top of the frame. I guess this is the foot of the door and the top of the door, but the room is completely dark so we have no bearings at all. Washington lets out a howl of agony to the very depth of his soul, and then both shafts of light close again. It's abstract in terms of meaning within the actual plot, but perfect as a metaphor.
Dickerson's active camera shines throughout, but one scene in particular I love is a conversation taking place in the street between a handful of Malcolm's followers, who flank him on either side. The camera whips back and forth between the speakers, who, for a higher degree of difficulty, keep replacing each other, meaning Dickerson has to whip to a slightly different spot in real time and land there just as the speaker is starting his or her line of dialogue. Then at the end after about 30 seconds, the shot rests on Malcolm in the middle. (Not the TV show.)
Then there's the crazy shot where Malcolm, during one of the times that he is being assaulted by incoming harassing phone calls that refuse to stop, is staring straight at the camera, his chin held up by a thumb and forefinger. The camera steadily turns 360 degrees so that he's upside down in the shot and then right side up again. What a way to depict a henpecked mind.
Two other quick thoughts before I leave off on the specifics about the movie.
Another thing I don't think a lot of other directors would do is give us the kind of overlapping dialogue that Lee gives us at the end. The scenes where Malcolm is reading aloud the words of the letter he's written Betty, and she is also reading them to a gathered group of friends and associates, contain an unusual amount of dialogue spoken in unison, or almost in unison. In the background are scenes of Mecca. It's profound.
Lastly, the chaos after Malcolm's assassination reminds me of the intense climax of Do the Right Thing, with bodies on the ground, screaming, and general bedlam, a perfect encapsulation of how it has all gone south.
This may not have been a cogent, holistic consideration of what makes Malcolm X so great, and why I'm so happy I own it now, so it won't be another 34 years before I watch it again. But I think my enthusiasm is clear.
I did want to finish with one final thought.
One fairly brief scene had stayed with me for its succinctness and potency, and especially how it spoke to me personally as a white person.
I'm sure you remember the scene where a young white woman approaches Malcolm and a couple of his cohorts, certain in her progressive bonafides, knowing she doesn't have a racist bone in her body and only wishing to lend some small amount to Malcolm's cause. She says she has nothing to do with the sins of her ancestors and wonders what she, a good white person, can do to help.
"Nothing," he says, and walks away.
He doesn't try to explain his answer. I'm sure he considers the answer self-explanatory, but perhaps of greater pertinence is that he just doesn't consider this woman worthy of more than a curt brush-off. It's not an impolite brush-off -- even being impolite would suggest more emotional investment in this moment than he wants to give. It's just direct and to the point, and it ends the conversation immediately.
Malcolm X would later repudiate his notion that all whites are devils. In trying to forge a new way separate from the Nation of Islam, which had forsaken him, he revisited his idea of judging a person absolutely by the color of their skin. In the final year or so of his life, he tried to be a bit more like Martin Luther King Jr.
But that scene does and should resonate with white audiences, and it's felt especially apt in the racial discourse that has consumed the country, nay the world, in the ten years since Donald Trump's first presidency began.
Progressive-minded people can and should do whatever they can to make the world better, but it's not the responsibility of Black people to endorse their progressive mindedness. I don't think anyone would say now that "nothing" can and should be done in this fight, but there are altogether too many people out there who want to be congratulated merely for thinking and saying the right things. Do, or do not; there is no try. And whatever you do, don't make it the responsibility of a Black person to guide you through it and tell you you are good at every step of the way.
If I thought Malcolm X was long, in September I have Erich von Stroheim's Greed. I saw the four-hour version the first time, so between now and then I'll have to figure out if I want to watch this version again or if I'll opt for the two hour and 10 minute version available on Kanopy.
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