"America A Little Lower Than Heaven"

Rating: 5/10 (30 December 2015)

We should be, and we are, grateful for the crumbs, whenever Hollywood provides audiences with the portrait of a courageous individual who has the strength of character to stand against impossible odds and defy powerful forces in American society. It will be interesting in a few years to look up Dr. Bennet Omalu, now in California, and discover what will have happened to him, after all the media attention which has now been focused his way. There is a price to be paid, in today's world, for articulating bedrock faith in historical Christianity, the traditions of which were the basis of the film's true portrayal of Dr. Omalu's spiritual approach to all the thousands of autopsies he has performed, in recognition that a human being consists of body, soul, and spirit.
But where there is faith on the part of one man, there is also cynicism on the part of others. In this case, three months before the film's official release, the New York Times released a story that the top people at Sony, through their company lawyers, exchanged emails with the film's creative team, seeking to pacify the NFL. Call it damage control, or simply protecting a 'narrative'. No villains, please.
We should be, and we are, so grateful that this movie was actually made. It will never jolt America with a Sunday Football Revolution, but thankfully there will be parents here and there who will take the lesson to heart, for the sake of their children, before the whole culture's usual attention-span amnesia kicks in (pun intended).
Most interesting to industry watchers is how the choice of the director was made, who worked with the lady who wrote up the original magazine story about Dr. Omalu for GQ, to come up with a shooting script.
Peter Landesman has moved up from being a foreign correspondent, covering wars of the American Empire for the MSM, and now he is a respected film director with two other critically acclaimed movies under his belt. The film "Parkland" gave a new generation an on-the-ground-running portrayal of events when John F. Kennedy was killed, especially right there live-and-in-person in the Dallas hospital... without discussing the autopsy reports, or showing the presence of three different Presidential coffins.
Landesman's next opus was "To Kill The Messenger," and that film promotes a 'narrative' that investigative reporter Gary Webb committed suicide, after outing the CIA for drug running.
Now in "Concussion," the audience can feast on revelations about sports injuries, without dwelling on identifying the accessories culpable for crimes committed against players and public alike over decades.
Kudos to Dr. Bennet Omula, whose present euphoria will inevitably deflate, bringing him back to earth. He is right in saying that America is just a little below Heaven. But "just a little" is still a long way down.