Shaka King (2021)
The day after I watched it, Judas and the Black Messiah made Oscars history of a peculiar kind. Among its six nominations, both leads – Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield – received Supporting Actor nods for their work. Who were they supporting? The day after that, I read a Sight & Sound (March 2021) feature on Shaka King’s movie. Views and comments attributed to King in that piece suggest he’ll derive particular satisfaction from the categorisation of Kaluuya’s and Stanfield’s performances, daft as it is. The Messiah of the title is Fred Hampton, the exceptionally young and charismatic chairman of the Black Panther party in Chicago, who was shot dead, at the age of twenty-one, during a police raid on his apartment in December 1969. Among Hampton’s best-known pronouncements is that ‘you don’t fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism’. According to the S&S article, Shaka King ‘admits to some discomfort with the film’s title, for the way it suggests a more traditional biopic focus on Hampton [Kaluuya] and his antagonist William O’Neal [Stanfield], an informant for the FBI’. Does King see Academy voters’ failure to spot any lead performers as proof of his success in reflecting, through the film he’s made, Fred Hampton’s collectivism?
King opens with a scene-setting montage of news film and sixties pop music. Worked into this is mock-archive footage of J Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen), warning of the dangers posed by the Black Panthers and, in particular, the rise of a ‘black messiah’. There’s also a simulated clip from William O’Neal’s only screen interview, for an episode in the second series of Henry Hampton’s TV documentary Eyes on the Prize, recorded in 1989. This leads into the narrative proper, which starts by describing how O’Neal, a car thief on the West Side of Chicago, came to work for the FBI. His criminal technique includes claiming to be a law officer and telling a car owner their car is logged as a stolen vehicle (this supposedly makes the owner more likely to hand over their car keys). In late 1968, O’Neal is arrested during an attempted theft. Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), the FBI agent who questions him in custody, gives O’Neal the choice between a jail sentence (eighteen months for stealing a car, five years for impersonating a police officer) and infiltrating the Chicago Black Panthers, working undercover for the FBI as part of its Cointelpro activities.
The narrative that follows, which climaxes in Hampton’s death from police bullets a short while after O’Neal has drugged his drink, is absorbing but rarely penetrating. King, who wrote the screenplay with Will Berson, Keith Lucas and Kenny Lucas, tells Nicholas Russell in S&S that: ‘We ended up having to sacrifice a lot of characters, a lot of storylines, just to get this entire story in there’. Even with those sacrifices, Judas and the Black Messiah favours breadth of focus at the expense of depth. There are individually strong sequences: a well-staged shootout with police at the Black Panther Party (BPP) offices; an interview in which Hoover, with quiet menace, reminds Mitchell (Jesse Plemons is, as usual, excellent) of white America’s moral duty to subdue Black Power. King shows how Fred Hampton’s exceptional oratory enabled him to form a ‘Rainbow Coalition’ with other marginalised local communities, including, most remarkably, a working-class white group who fly the Confederate Flag at their rallies. An episode concerning George Sams (Terayle Hill), hiding out at the BPP offices after killing a suspected FBI plant in the organisation, takes the viewer, as well as O’Neal, by surprise when Mitchell explains that it’s Sams who’s the real FBI informant. Yet the film fails, thanks to shallow direction, to create a sense of persisting unease and suspicion among the Panthers about spies in their midst.
A subplot involving the killing of a young Panther called Jimmy Palmer (Ashton Sanders), which lacks impact because Palmer hasn’t appeared enough to register as an individual, is typical of a major weakness of the film: King’s ‘democratic’ approach to drama turns out to mean spreading himself thin. He’s right the title is questionable but only because the implied equal billing for O’Neal and Hampton is misleading. It may be fairly accurate in terms of screen time but O’Neal is a sketchy conception. The S&S feature also includes interviews with Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield. When he was sent the script Stanfield assumed that King wanted him to play Fred Hampton; when he learned otherwise he re-read the script and ‘realised there was an opportunity to explore something interesting’. Stanfield’s words don’t quite conceal his disappointment at not being offered the better role but he gamely describes trying, despite his feelings about what O’Neal did, to ‘connect with his humanity’. He was fighting a losing battle, though.
O’Neal is as underwritten a character as his biblical progenitor. The film reveals nothing about his personal life outside the job he’s doing for the FBI. There’s little indication of how his feelings about that job are developing, even when he tries (and fails) to quit as an informant. While Hampton is in prison (on verging-on-comical charges of assaulting an ice-cream truck driver, stealing ice creams and giving them to children in the street), O’Neal rises through the BPP ranks. There’s a good bit, after the Party offices have been torched, when he supervises repairs to the building. Here, Stanfield is able to hint that O’Neal wants to be a genuine contributor to the movement. That doesn’t come through, however, in a more crucial scene. Mitchell, posing as one of the white Rainbow Coalition members, attends one of Hampton’s rallies. He watches O’Neal’s reactions and afterwards gives him a warning, claiming he can see that O’Neal has been won over by Hampton’s rhetoric. That’s not what comes through the screen at all: O’Neal just looks miserably anxious. Because the script doesn’t him enough to work with, LaKeith Stanfield lets his face give away too much – usually that O’Neal’s scared of being found out.
That the actor playing O’Neal is forced to make the best of a bad job doesn’t matter to Nicholas Russell, whose S&S piece is always woke, sometimes intemperate and occasionally incomprehensible (King’s film’s ‘power is in depicting the everyday dangers and struggles of Black radicals and organisers, in sitting between those moments in stillness, and in imagining the Black political biopic as something that exists beyond condescension towards different modes of Black life’). Russell is bluntly dismissive of William O’Neal as ‘cowardly’ and ‘selfish’. He mentions O’Neal’s being ‘coerced into informing’ without a glimmer of sympathy for his predicament. He seems to think a desperate African-American teenage lawbreaker should simply have known better than to betray the Black Panther cause.
The casting of both main roles muffles an important aspect of the true story: how very young both protagonists were. LaKeith Stanfield was twenty-eight when the film was made, William O’Neal still a teenager when recruited by the FBI. The age difference detracts from a sense of O’Neal’s exploitability. (It also makes you wonder about the historical accuracy of other details. If O’Neal was only nineteen when he started working undercover, it’s hard to believe that, when he was stealing cars, their drivers believed he was the police officer he claimed to be.) Daniel Kaluuya was thirty at the time of the shoot, nine years older than Fred Hampton was when he died. This makes it harder to appreciate fully Hampton’s extraordinarily precocious skills as a political organiser and performer.
In every other sense, however, Kaluuya is most impressive. He gives Hampton’s oratory a distinctive and compelling rhythm and power, which are further enhanced by Sean Bobbitt’s dynamic cinematography. In private, Kaluuya has a different intensity. This comes through in the increasingly tender scenes between Hampton and his girlfriend and fellow activist Deborah Johnson (well played by Dominique Fishback), and when he’s drinking tea in the kitchen of a woman (Alysia Joy Powell) whose Panther son has recently been killed. On the public platform, Kaluuya’s body has an electrifying tension. This makes his relaxation in Deborah’s company all the more expressive.
Nicholas Russell notes that the film, unlike traditional biopics of Civil Rights pioneers, has ‘no stirring fades to black as large crowds chant for freedom’ and that ‘If you’re unfamiliar with the Black Panther Party’s core tenets, its key leadership figures or Cointelpro …, there’s no title card to explain things for you’. Shaka King tells Russell he resisted studio pressure to ‘contextualise things’ because ‘For me, though, it was the idea of contextualising the conditions that the Black Panthers were fighting against. It’s the same conditions we’re fighting against now, you know?’ I’m not sure what exactly the first part of that quote means but the second part is revealing.
In limiting the historically specific details, King blurs the difference between the Panthers and Black Lives Matter as if to suggest a virtually common manifesto. On the face of it, this doesn’t seem to make sense. Fred Hampton speaks an unequivocal political language. There may be no crowds in the film chanting freedom; there is a crowd to take up Hampton’s percussive, insistent chant, ‘I am a revolutionary!’ Is BLM really seen as a revolutionary movement, except by its benighted antagonists or in the sense of promoting a ‘revolution’ in the attitudes that underlie racially motivated violence? Yet Shaka King’s more extravagant remarks to S&S – such as his assertion that centrist ‘inaction contributes to Black people’s demise just as much as’ the action of the white supremacist murderer Dylann Roof – give the strong impression that he personally doesn’t distinguish BPP and BLM conceptions of changing the status quo.
There may not be detailed signposting of the kind Nicholas Russell has in mind at the start of Judas and the Black Messiah but there’s a lot of explanatory text on screen at the end, as well as, needless to say, archive footage of the real Fred Hampton and William O’Neal – the latter in the real version of his Eyes on the Prize interview. This aired in late January 1990, a few days after O’Neal had taken his own life. Twenty years after Fred Hampton’s death, O’Neal’s face in interview wears a closed-off yet haunted look. What he says suggests a still conflicted man. Of course the politically engaged makers of this film weren’t interested in exploring that conflict but I think ignoring it amounts to an oversight in a piece of social commentary, as well as a wasted dramatic opportunity. Having Judas firmly in the forefront might even have helped the Academy’s actors branch realise there was a lead actor in the movie.
14 March 2021
