Judas and the Black Messiah; the last movie to tip its way into eligibility for a long-winded and awaited awards season for me. My cut-off is going to be the end of March.
Directed by Shaka King, when car thief William ‘Bill’ O’Neil (Lakeith Stanfield) gets arrested, he has two options – face five years in jail, or work undercover for FBI Special Agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) as a rat infiltrating the Black Panther organisation. The current chairman of the Black Panthers in Chicago is Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya); a wildly charismatic leader, uniting the downtrodden members of his community at a rapid rate. For a while I wondered if this movie was based on true events, having never heard of Fred Hampton (I may have missed the ‘based on true events’ title at the start), but by the end, when the movie makes it obvious to me that it is, it must change my take on Judas and the Black Messiah a little bit.
It’s harder to comment on movies that contain these hot-button ever-present stories on race inequality when they are based on true events; the best I can do is comment on how well the story resonates with me and how the performances made me feel. I may have to plead ‘the Australian’ on this one, not knowing the complete historic timeline of Martin Luthor King and Malcolm X that led to Fred Hampton being of the mind and position that we find him in, inside the Black Panthers. I don’t think the movie does its best at relaying exactly what the community and the Black Panthers are lobbying for – they are advocating for civil liberty through socialism sure, and safety from cop violence, but the movie doesn’t provide its own early concrete examples of oppression as if we are supposed to know exactly where it’s at; and maybe we are. But with that said, the Black Panthers and the police seem to go tit-for-tat for a long portion of this story, and relating it to myself and today, it just makes me glad that Australia doesn’t have a readiness for gun violence (or gun love) that’s always been possible in the US – you know, I’m talking about that shoot-out that takes place at the Black Panther headquarters and escalates quickly, because policemen are taunting the Panthers from the gutters; it’s unbelievable to me. This scene also comes after a Black Panther randomly shoots two police on the street, and is put in hospital himself. Taking the historical subject matter off the table for a second, this stuff reminded me of problems I had with The Kitchen, where both warring sides are hostile and horrible, and I struggled to commend either of them. Since Judas and the Black Messiah is based on true events though, how can I argue with history? Yet there was a period around the three-quarter mark where I found myself staring at the exit lights on the carpet in the cinema, wanting this movie to end.
I think on The Wire – a show I adored, and turn to a lot in my quest to understand the racial conflict between police and citizens; that TV show has the police wound tight by bureaucracy and inner corruption, but it felt like a balanced account of community and crook. The other movie I look to in terms of police violence is The Hate U Give, which preaches love in the face of a very real problem, of racial prejudice and social escalation, where Judas and the Black Messiah seems to be fuelled by hate – when Bill offers to blow up a state building with C4 after Hampton has done nothing but talk about killing cops for satisfaction and dying for the cause, I don’t understand why Hampton didn’t think this was a good idea as well; Hampton gets angry, goes to punch Bill and walks away in a huff without explaining why his words shouldn’t be misconstrued in this way; again, maybe it should be obvious, but I didn’t get it.
Positively, the scenes that explore Bill and Roy Mitchell’s partnership have some real stakes, and it’s hard not to be consider a likeness to The Departed when conversations revolve around putting a rat in an oppositional organisation and the squeeze felt by that rat. The movie does a good job of exposing both groups – most firmly the FBI’s ravenous bias, and their completely racist operation led from the top by J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen); Roy Mitchell first insists the Black Panthers are as brutal as the clan, before swallowing his own bitter pill on his institution and following suit. Judas and the Black Messiah has great energetic scenes, especially regarding Fred Hampton rebel-rousing the community and I loved the through-line regarding Hampton and his writer/girlfriend Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback). If this movie was fictional, I’d suggest Judas and the Black Messiah should have done a better job at showing Hampton to be a real jerk at the beginning, before moving towards being a more wholesome community leader – that would’ve made it easier for Bill to believe he is doing a good thing as a rat up until the very end. I think the movie does indicate Hampton was a ballbuster, by the way Deborah pulls him up on his speech at the beginning, but as I understand it, the movie wants to half it both ways, where we still support the ill-fated Hampton absolutely throughout. Even Bill, who is clearly motivated by money over politics initially, doesn’t develop a clear political ideology for himself in the final moments; only that he’s in danger and cornered by the FBI.
For the star-studded line-up, starting with Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton… I was always conscious he was putting on an accent; Kaluuya never disappeared into the part like the best performances do. I know he’s got great range – playing a larrikin in his native land on Skins, an affable gentleman in Get Out and behaving quite menacing in Widows. Undeniably, Kaluuya excels at giving Hampton larger-than-life charisma as a leader of his generation but based off the performance, I probably personally prefer Stanfield better; an actor I always align with oozing energy, I give him props for being terrifically convincing as this serious man with the world on his shoulders. Jesse Plemons fits into the FBI role well, as he does with most roles, and Dominique Fishback is an unexpected delight, as an actress I haven’t come across many times before.
The FBI and police do absolutely egregious things in this movie, even blowing up a building with gas cylinders, and these abuses of power should never be forgotten. I don’t want to dismiss this movie because the contents of it are repulsive, but I don’t want to be incensed casually by BLM rhetoric either. Judas and the Black Messiah is shot beautifully, and I think I’d like to revisit it in my own time.
3.5
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