Denzel Washington’s latest role, in The Hurricane, adds to a body of work that bears elegant testament to the black American experience
Elvis Mitchell
For a long time, Denzel Washington made a career out of suffusing old-school white liberal movies with a dizzying rush of flesh and blood.
Take the well-meaning Cry Freedom in 1987 in which he plays Steve Biko – and for which he won his first Oscar nomination, for best supporting actor. The film dealt with the burden that poor newspaperman Donald Woods suffered as a result of living in racist South Africa.
Washington’s intellectually restless Biko is in the movie for only a few scenes, but so dominates the film that he provides a kind of climax. He brings so much heat in his limited screen time that the struggle of the Woods family to escape the country is trivialised. Instead, Freedom dissolves into an act of racial cowardice because no movie studio in the Eighties would have made a film about Biko. The film is the equivalent of paying survivor’s benefits to someone who has witnessed an accident.
Washington has been compared with Sidney Poitier, and the two men share a lion- hearted pride, a stubbornness fuelled by a core of anger.
That elegant distance that Poitier was so often applauded for masked a furnace of rage; many of his performances were marked by what he did not dare say, but every black American in the audience felt.
Washington is his heir and he gets to mouth the sentiments that Poitier would never utter. He was born and raised the son of a Pentecostal minister in Mount Vernon, New York State, and the flame of the true believer burns in his eyes.
Remember that Washington made a huge impact in the Eighties, when studios were more comfortable making films based on old TV shows than they were making movies featuring African-American actors. Until Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, which showed the United States something as alien as Martians – thriving middle-class black characters without prison records or white friends to lend them validity – there was believed to be no market for films with black actors.
Before then, Washington did his best to prop up bad movies. Already, in his first movie, Carbon Copy (1981), a dead-headed attempt at social comedy, Washington was making great use of his agile reflexes. He is the illegitimate son of a Beverly Hills businessman played by George Segal and the whole movie turns on Washington’s sudden appearance ruining Segal’s life.
As this unwieldy monster grinds to a close, and even the extras seem to be checking their watches to see if they have qualified for overtime, Washington has to deliver one of those payback-is-a- dog speeches. For a moment, his phenomenal ease disappears and undeniable sparks of anger smoulder in his eyes.
Suddenly, this well-meaning fraud of a movie, with its narcoleptic timing, comes into focus. Audiences – that is, the nine people outside the cast and crew who sat through Carbon Copy – must have sat there, blinking away the intrusion of recognisable human feeling.
He survived Carbon Copy because he worked at his craft. He was simultaneously appearing on stage in A Soldier’s Play, which later became the feature film A Soldier’s Story. And the anger that kept Poitier so forceful and upright gave Washington an athletic fluidity.
During the Eighties, he was a regular on the St Elsewhere TV hospital drama, another display of self-congratulatory liberalism, quietly doing his work. Washington eventually slipped smoothly out of St Elsewhere as he continued to build a movie career, propping up films such as Power. And black audiences were not waiting for People magazine to tell them that Washington was worth his weight in celluloid.
They kept an eye on him and his progress. (Though frankly, if African- Americans had to twiddle their thumbs while hoping the mainstream press would validate its de facto underground popular culture, the world would still be waiting for the arrival of artist Jacob Lawrence, Aretha Franklin and rap.)
It was Glory (1989), the story of one of the black regiments that fought the confederacy during the American Civil War, that served as his breakthrough and made mainstream audiences take notice. He plays, anachronistically, the insolent slave Trip. In the scene that probably clinched his Oscar for best supporting actor, Trip shrugs off his shirt and pivots his torso, awaiting a whipping so photogenic that you wonder if Helmut Newton was a consultant on the picture.
He also showed notable presence in films such as Mississippi Masala (1990), and finally got to play a raffish leading man in Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues (1990), their first collaboration. Glory was part of the collection of films depicting the black experience to which Washington seems honour-bound to commit himself.
The Hurricane, the biopic of the life of boxer and convict Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, may end up being as controversial as Carter’s real-life exploits. (Articles have appeared questioning the veracity of the film, as if people turn to the movies for education. Isn’t that why God made tabloid news magazine shows?)
Washington’s Rubin Carter sizes up every opportunity as it appears, deciding on his level of involvement. When Lesra, the kid who will eventually lead the charge to free him, turns up at the penitentiary to visit, Carter’s gaze is quick and cold. He immediately picks over Lesra’s psyche as the boy sits in front of him and sees no reason to continue this relationship. Carter’s face is a mask of dissatisfaction and frustration, even when “Hurricane” flashes back to his day as a murderous boxer who revels in his physical arrogance.
His rolling shoulders hang back, and he sidles into frame – at this point in his life, looking for a fight and taking the ones he can find in the ring.
This may be the first time that Washington has had a physical relief for his volatility and he charges into the fight sequences with relish. They’re swift, merciless beatings; the drama is in seeing Carter’s utter enjoyment in rushing an opponent.
Unbelievably, his effort in The Hurricane didn’t win Washington the Academy Award. His performance is a wonder, but not nearly as prodigious as his Malcolm X, also directed by Lee – perhaps the best performance of the Nineties.
His evolution from dissolute to resolute, from convict to conviction, is magnificent. He is peerless at exhibiting confidence, but the doubt in his eyes – a wrenching helplessness – is a facet of his talent he rarely gets to use.
In the prison scenes when he’s reaching out for spiritual completion, he brings to mind the title of the Malcolm X script that James Baldwin wrote: One Day When I Was Lost.
This element is an important aspect of another of his best, and little seen, leads: Devil in a Blue Dress. It is one of the few times that Washington seems to be in the movie with other people – this time he is not separated by the effort of keeping the picture afloat.
Director Carl Franklin’s adaptation of Afro-noir novelist Walter Mosley’s first Easy Rawlins book teems with not just life, but ambience, and Washington is central to the conception. He has eye contact with the other characters, and is totally involved in the tense desperation that would send a black man dwelling in deeply segregated, and dangerous, Forties Los Angeles into taking on seamy private eye work. Washington’s love scene with a way-too-willing friend (the astonishingly voluptuous Lisa Nicole Carson) is sexy and hilarious.
Maybe the seediness of the setting, and an ad campaign that made the picture look like a lame piece of nostalgia frozen in Jurassic Park amber, scared audiences away. No one went, and they also stayed away from that sad period when Washington tried to pick up some of that easy action-hero money lying around, starring in several overheated but turgid manly man films.
Washington sliced his way through the film business’s institutional indifference to blacks during a forgettable decade of film, and almost single-handedly revived the black matinee idol/ideal, a title that had been retired since Billy Dee Williams saw leading-man roles wither and had to turn to selling malt liquor on American TV. They don’t give awards for that, but someone should.