Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor of 1992 -- Masterpiece Snubbed at Academy Awards and Golden Globes

Rating: 10/10 (13 November 2007)

Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven", the major winner of the Academy Awards in 1992 for best director and best film, is good solid film-making. However, "Malcolm X", produced and directed by Spike Lee and starring Denzel Washington in the title role, is a bona fide masterpiece--a 20th century film equivalent to a masterwork of the Renaissance. Certainly, it may be unfair to evaluate the two films against each other, but since one received much more acclaim than the other during the year of its release, it begs comparison. However, it's like comparing a Caravaggio with Michaelangelo's frescoes atop the Sistine Chapel. The first is certainly exceptional but the latter is a magnum opus. "Malcolm X" is Spike Lee's Sistine Chapel. Like Selznik's "Gone with the Wind" or Welles' "Citizen Kane", "Malcolm X" may be hard to top.
The only thing equally as superb as Washington's acting is the directing and the script, which is at once honest and compelling. Except for a coda at the end that seems at odds with the rest of the film, the script is near perfect, relying heavily on true accounts of Malcolm X's life instead of altering the story to fit prescribed entertainment values, a bad habit of Hollywood filmmakers. Instead, Lee and Washington rely on Malcolm X and his history as the guiding force behind the film. Many of the incidences portrayed in "Malcolm X" actually happened, from his father being assassinated on railroad tracks, to the young Malcolm being involved with drug dealing to his rise as a star among the Nation of Islam, or so-called Black Muslims. In one scene that is history and not fiction, Malcolm X orders his entourage of male associates to stand outside a hospital when a fellow Muslim, Brother Johnson, requires medical attention.
Malcolm Little was an African-American, the son of an assassinated preacher whose family had sustained vicious threats from the KKK. As a young man, he relocated to Harlem and became a streetwise hoodlum involved in crime gangs. Racketeering, gambling, prostitution, and drug dealing were his first religion. Then after an incident with white girls that landed himself and his associate Shorty (Spike Lee, perfectly cast) in jail, he meets a member of a new religious organization claiming kinship with Muslims in the Middle East and re-claiming their African roots.
Headed by the honorable Elijah Muhammad who had converted to Islam and brought the religion (or at least his version of it) to the United States as the Nation of Islam, the so-called Black Muslims (although they do not refer to themselves as such) lures Malcolm into a new world of honesty, compassion, and purpose. To the their credit, the religious organization gives Malcolm Little, now renamed Malcolm X, a sense of purpose, an identity, a loving community, and rehabilitation from the vices that were destroying himself in Harlem.
After his conversion, he becomes a prominent voice among the sect, a spokesperson for the honorable Elijah Muhammad and his message of religious determinism. Simultaneously, they also preach dangerous messages including that all white folks are devils, and that the honorable Elijah Muhammad is to be obeyed without question. As the spokesman of their cause against whites, Malcolm X in some ways becomes the darker side of Martin Luther King, Jr who propagated that proclaiming African-American superiority was as sinful as proclaiming white superiority. The press dubbed Malcolm X the "angriest man in America".
Washington does more than just portray Malcolm X, he becomes him. Washington, I imagine, must have studied footage of his speeches and spoken with people who knew him. Speeches of the real Malcolm X as compared to speeches in the film as enacted by Washington are almost indistinguishable. His performance ranks as one of the top two or three performances by an actor in the history of the performing arts and cinema, up there with Ben Kingsly as Gandhi, Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane, Laurence Olivier as Hamlet, and Vivian Leigh as Scarlet O'Hara.
The turn in the film occurs when, in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm makes some ill-conceived remarks to the press. Malcolm X further learns that Elijah Muhammad is not practicing all that he preaches. The star of the so-called "Black Muslims" begins questioning not only his role but the integrity of the entire movement. He then makes a pilgrimage to Mecca, required at least once in the lifetime of a Muslim. His pilgrimage changes many of his views.
It's hard to describe this film without using many superlatives, but if there was ever a film that deserved it, it's "Malcolm X". Washington and Lee do a tremendous job of neither vilifying nor idealizing Malcolm X, the man. In retrospect on the man, I think Malcolm X began to realize he could serve a higher purpose to help unify rather than divide the races. In the end, Malcolm X began to encourage that dream, but, like Martin Luther King Jr, his mission was cut short. As for the film, it is an honest tribute to one of the most memorable figures of American history. And like the man himself, the work may only be appreciated by later generations. Malcolm X is the embodiment of the American story.