A Whole Lot of Caricatures

Rating: 2/10 (12 March 2019)

What is perhaps the most telling exchange in this ode to some mystical, post-racial looking back, boy to man story is that of the Kentucky fried chicken dialogue. When Tony consternates that he is "more black" than Don Shirley simply because he eats fried chicken and listens to Aretha Franklin, one can only pause at the absurdity of such an utterance from a presumed first generation Italian American to a African American man presumedly steeped in the 1950s Black Liberation movement. One would have expected Mr. Shirley to take a bat to the back of Tony's head with such a disparaged and, most certainly, historically inaccurate, depiction of American society pre-Civil Rights legislation, Pre-Voting Rights legislation, and at the cusp of a radical consciousness of Black identity still forming its sensibilities for the late-20th C. Placed in the context of American Southern apartheid, with a heap of hand waving by their Northern white countrymen, to suggest a white man of any ethnicity would gladly identify as more black than a African American man in the midst of one of the violent and consequential turning points in American history is not only ludicrous but offensive. The very script contradicts itself when later Tony assaults a police man in Alabama who assailed him with an epithet that for Mr. Shirley was par for the course. If this film is allegory of where we were a half century ago and all we have to look forward to now that we have freed ourselves from America's original sin, one can only contemplate how poorly we understand our own history and our inability to reckon with the utter failure of spirit that is American racism.