[ad_1]
The Regina King-starring biopic about the first Black woman presidential candidate doesn’t do its subject (or the star who plays her) justice.
Photo: Glen Wilson/Netflix
To damn by faint praise: Shirley is a perfectly serviceable film. John Ridley’s docudrama about Shirley Chisholm’s trailblazing but ill-fated 1972 presidential run doesn’t do much beyond the very basics of the genre. It doesn’t reinterpret Chisholm for the modern public consciousness. It doesn’t really serve as a character study, offering little genuine insight into the politician as a person. It doesn’t even provide much tangible context for the era surrounding her quest for the highest office in the land. For the most part, Shirley sticks to the soft lens of hagiographic symbolism, which may well be a reasonable function for a movie about a severely underrecognized political figure who once said she ran for presidency “despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo.” But what’s frustrating is how Shirley doesn’t seem to have any larger ideas about who Chisholm was as a politician and presidential candidate. It views her with an all-too-neat moralism about electoral politics, and this ultimately produces a movie that fails to match the actual power of its subject or Regina King, the star who plays her.
Written and directed by John Ridley (Needle in a Timestack, Five Days at Memorial), Shirley maintains a tight frame by almost exclusively focusing on Chisholm’s 1972 campaign. Elections make for natural dramatic structure: All the characters are driving toward a discernible resolution, and the journey is usually replete with the ups and downs of losses, wins, and hurdles. Broadly speaking, Shirley conforms to the template. After a brief opening sequence taking place around the time Chisholm becomes the first Black woman to be elected to Congress, the film jumps four years ahead to the moment she decides to become the first Black woman to run for the presidency, eventually working up to the dramatic climax of the 1972 Democratic National Convention.
Ridley’s script hits the major beats around Chisholm’s run. Her campaign faced the same challenges that continue to plague Black women in all political arenas. The white feminist movement was reluctant to throw its weight behind her, opting instead to prioritize other policy goals; Gloria Steinem gave her endorsement to George McGovern, though with the edge of regarding him as the “best white male candidate” in the cycle. The Black political Establishment, then overwhelmingly male, ultimately treated Chisholm as a negligible concern. These conflicts hover over the film’s depiction of Chisholm’s electoral struggle, though in a noteworthy choice that’s never substantially grappled with, it seems predominantly interested in her clash with Black men, as represented by her campaign manager Stanley Townsend (Brian Stokes Mitchell); Ron Dellums (Dorian Missick), the Californian congressman who supports her run early before switching his allegiance to McGovern; and Walter Fauntroy (André Holland, always fantastic), the politician and civil rights activist who’s also pursuing the presidency.
As Chisholm, Regina King, who also produced the film with her sister Reina, gives an unequivocally compelling central performance. Dressed with era-appropriate hair and costume, King makes tangible the volcanic determination that powered Chisholm through her political journey. When she quips, after falling back into a native Guyanese Bajan accent following a burst of emotion, “Slipping into my Bajan roots when I lose my religion,” it’s hard not to be taken by the electricity of King’s innate charisma. Most of her supporting cast are doing decent work as well. It’s lovely to see the late Lance Reddick, who plays the organizer Wesley “Mac” Holder, in one of his final roles, and you’ll also find Lucas Hedges as Robert Gottlieb, a young law-school student who becomes Chisholm’s national student coordinator. (Though Hedges should probably consider diversifying out of playing shy, awkward men.) However, one eyebrow-raising detail here is the casting of Terrence Howard, who’s been the subject of multiple physical-assault allegations dating back to the early 2000s. He plays Arthur Hardwick Jr., a former state legislator who would eventually become Chisholm’s second husband, and in Shirley, Hardwick Jr. is primarily portrayed as an adviser and a source of uncomplicated emotional support for Chisholm. His inclusion feels not only strange, but underbaked.
It should go without saying that Chisholm — a teacher whose strong will, self-belief, and religiosity informed her desire to run for the presidency — was a fascinating person. But those qualities could also produce liabilities. Her religious beliefs, for example, were said to inform her decision to visit George Wallace, one of American history’s most prominent segregationists, after a failed attempt on his life, which shocked her supporters at the time. Shirley sometimes gives us scenes where she makes the wrong strategic read, like an early sequence where she declares California to be a “big, shiny object that’ll leave us distracted and defeated,” only for the state to end up being an important target for her campaign. To its credit, Shirley does gesture to these frictions, though not in any substantial way. It also carved out some time to illustrate how Chisholm’s political self-belief placed her at odds with her family, whether it’s her husband Conrad (Michael Cherrie), whose needs she often steamrolled over, or her sister Muriel St. Hill, played by Reina King. Those aspects, too, suffer from a lack of serious exploration.
All these flaws are made even more vivid by the fact there are other stronger documents on Chisholm’s legacy in pop culture, including a standout episode of Mrs. America — featuring a spectacular Uzo Aduba as Chisholm — and an award-winning documentary, Chisholm ’72, from 2005, which covers the exact same ground as Shirley. In different ways, those pieces grappled with the full complexity of Chisholm and her political era she operated in. Shirley’s biggest flaw is its lack of genuine engagement with the muck of politics, and in this, the film mirrors its own portrayal of its subject. “Just more backroom politics,” Chisholm scoffs during a meeting with Fauntroy, who sought to cut a deal for the D.C. primary, in what is perhaps the very first scene in Shirley that has any spark, which comes about 30 minutes into the picture. The movie ultimately sides with her on this note, and that elides the reality of how politics is often a grimy process at every point in history. Part of what’s interesting about Chisholm, at least as portrayed in the film, is how her idealism constantly teeters on the brink of political liability. “Little girl, the first thing you gotta do is vote,” she says to a young Barbara Lee (Christina Jackson). “If all you’re doing is outside yelling and screaming, that’s all you’re ever gonna be, a yeller and a screamer.” Politics, of course, is never as simple as that.
See All
[ad_2]
Source link
