larger than life but so Malcolm was

Rating: Null/10 (3 April 2006)

It was almost inevitable that any work that attempted to tell the story of a personality as large as that of Malcolm X would fall into larger-than-life schematics and all too many Steven Spielburg skies. So it is particularly fitting that the first major film work done on the life of Malcolm, Spike Lee's MALCOLM X, was generated by one of U.S. film making's most controversial talents. MALCOLM X was released at a time when all too many Black Americans were hungry for work about African American icons that stepped outside of the Budweiser Corporation type representation of Black experience seen on tavern walls, so it shouldn't surprise that the first Black film maker to take on so ambitious a project sometimes fell into spectaclist technique. People need legends and heroes, and Malcolm is certainly a heroic figure.
Malcolm's story has become increasingly familiar to people outside the Black community. A man with a strong sense of self-identification from his youth, he moved through several identity changes, from shoeshine hustler to railroad porter to borderline gangster to convict to minister and organizer of the Nation of Islam, to the dynamic articulator of African American struggle that he was in his final push for the Organization of African American Unity. His life was the flip side of what is called the American Dream, and when he was murdered at the age of 39 in 1965, he was well on his way to becoming the leader of a revolutionary democratic insurgence in the United States. In short, his life was the stuff of legend.
So along comes Spike Lee, and assembles this remarkable cast in telling the story of his life: Denzel Washington as Malcolm, Angela Basset as Dr. Betty Shabazz, Al Freeman Jr. as Elijah Mohammed, Delroy Lindo as Malcolm's street "mentor" West Indian Archie, Albert Hall as his prison associate, Brother Baines, and Giancarlo Esposito as one of Malcolm's assassins, Thomas Hayer. There are numerous cameos from Hollywood glitterati, and even unlikely personalities such as the late and notorious radical attorney William Kuntsler appears in this film as the judge who sentences Malcolm to his prison term. There are also a number of clever black and white footages that, when shot, bore so close a resemblance to the newsreels some of us grew up with, they become difficult to tell from the originals. Denzel comes that close to the real man's carriage and timbre.
I do regret that Spike Lee did not feel the need to acknowledge the contributions made to his screenplay posthumously by James Baldwin. It seems to me several portions of this film are loosely lifted from Baldwin's stillborn film biography of Malcolm, ONE DAY WHEN I WAS LOST. But I suppose that's an issue for the legatees of Baldwin's estate to work out with Lee.
The bottom line is that this was a timely film (1992), Disney-like crescendos and all. The movie was released in the wake of the Los Angeles Riots that followed the verdict on the LAPD beating of Rodney King. The work gave younger and older Black people an event to talk about and do some mutually respectful sharing of ideas about cultural integrity and critique, and if that's all Spike Lee accomplished with MALCOLM X, that's good enough for me.