Malcolm X Done Right

Rating: Null/10 (1 December 2007)

This film went through hell on its way to the screen. It was fondled, butchered, divorced and remarried, sunk, then revived. Along the way, the story evolved from a one story to several, only loosely connected as the studio tried to cover all bases.
Scott hired on basically to keep working. its one of his lesser projects, like "Hannibal," where he follows the script fed by others. But still, he has a cinematic style that makes this worth watching if you love visual poetry. In fact, you can watch this with no sound whatever and possibly enjoy it more. That's because Scott designs his shots and shaves his editing so that (almost) each shot anticipates the next. Its unique in modern film-making, and when he goes, this style will probably die. "Gladiator" was the height of this, and Crowe understands what he has to do to feed it. He's not there much, but the sequence where the raid on the drug lab is so "in the future" it will be a film school staple for decades.
Washington doesn't get this end of film-making. He was inherited from an earlier incarnation of the film. So instead of being inside the film, he's placed outside. He's not the story, but what the story uses to tell itself. Its a subtle distinction -- and Washington's cluelessness as an actor is used against him -- but it makes the thing a bit more coherent to consider his character as simply shaped by the forces around him. Washington has such a narrow range, I couldn't help compare this to Spike Lee's picture. Spike goes for the story as it appears in the actors. He discovers it and captures it in bits. He doesn't compose a movie; its coherence comes from found characters. So his pictures have no cinematic soul, and give the illusion of finding reality. That can work when he actually finds life, which is rare. He didn't in "X" so the choppy nature of that arc stands in contrast to the energetic action of time this has.
Scott also likes to designate watchers, even if not written in the script. See how he manages to photograph the two wives in such a way that they are internal surrogates for us?
The one thing that annoys is those labels to tell us where were we are, Thailand, Brooklyn, Fort Bragg and so on. This is just cinematic laziness. Scott could easily have shown us where we were, and in fact does some of the time. Studios again, I suppose.
Yes, it references films of the period, specifically gangster and blaxsploitation. But that's almost trite by now.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.