Race

Director: Stephen Hopkins
Screenplay: Joe Shrapnel & Anna Waterhouse
Stars: Stephan James (Jesse Owens), Jason Sudeikis (Larry Snyder), Eli Goree (Dave Albritton), Shanice Banton (Ruth Solomon), Carice van Houten (Leni Riefenstahl), Jeremy Irons (Avery Brundage), William Hurt (Jeremiah Mahoney), David Kross (Carl “Luz” Long), Jonathan Higgins (Dean Cromwell), Tony Curran (Lawson Robertson), Amanda Crew (Peggy), Barnaby Metschurat (Joseph Goebbels)
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Year of Release: 2016
Country: U.S.
Race
RaceRace, a biopic about the great Olympic runner Jesse Owens, balances in roughly even measure the two meanings of its title: the activity at which Owens was the best in the world and the social construct based on physical appearance that hampered his acceptance in both Jim Crow-era America and Nazi Germany, where he won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games. It’s a canny title—almost too obvious to work—as it signals how the film rises above the prosaic nature of telling an athletic hero’s life story by engaging with the complexities of racial discrimination both here and abroad. There is much gnashing of teeth about the awfulness of the Third Reich and its treatment of non-Aryans, but as the film makes abundantly clear, things weren’t much better, at least ideologically, back home for Owens. In fact, in a strange twist, it was only in Hitler’s Berlin that Owens and the other black athletes were allowed to stay in the same hotel and eat at the same restaurants as their white compatriots.

The film opens in 1933 just as Owens, played with grace and good nature by Stephan James (Selma), is about to leave his home in Cleveland for the Ohio State University, where he plans to run track under the guidance of Coach Larry Snyder (comedian Jason Sudeikis, reasonably effective in his first dramatic role), a former record-holding runner whose glory days have passed and on whose shoulders rests the university’s fading track-and-field program. Owens comes from a poor, struggling family, and much is made about the sacrifice his mother makes in sewing him a blue blazer for his entry into college and his unemployed father’s conflicted sense of both pride in his son and shame for his own economic plight. Once at OSU, Owens runs into no shortage of racial hostilities from his fellow students, who stare at him as if he were an alien. A special level of denigration comes from the football players, with whom the track athletes must share a locker room. Coach Snyder seems to operate above the racial rancor (when he demands that Owens look him in the eye in an early conversation, he singularly discards hundreds of years of social policy that insisted that black men lower their eyes in submission when being addressed by white people), although he has his own issues with lost dreams, unwieldy expectations, and a heavy reliance on the bottle. However, he turns out to be a dedicated mentor who teaches the already naturally gifted Owens to be even better, leading to both his amazing feat of setting three world records and tying a fourth in 45 minutes at the Big Ten Meet in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then his ascension to the U.S. Olympic team.

Interwoven throughout Owens’s experiences as a college track athlete is the drama facing the U.S. Olympic Committee, whose conflict is embodied by committee chairman Avery Brundage (Jeremy Irons) and Jeremiah Mahoney (William Hurt), head of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). The liberal-minded Mahoney feels that the U.S. should boycott the 1936 Games in Berlin as a statement against the Nazis’ already evident racial policies, particularly their persecution of Jews, whereas Mahoney, a millionaire construction czar with a flare for hard-nosed negotiation, insists on the U.S. pragmatic need to be represented on the world stage. Mahoney ends up travelling to Berlin to discuss the issue with the Nazis, particularly the dour propaganda minister Joseph Goebbles (Barnaby Metschurat), and he insists that they tone down their racial rhetoric, at least in the lead-up to and during the Games. It turns out to be a deal with the devil, as the Nazis agree to take down the most overt signs of their racial policies in exchange for being granted a world stage to demonstrate the resurgence of Germany under Hitler, which is perhaps best evoked by the physically imposing coliseum within which Hitler and Goebbels fully expect their “master race” to dominate.

But, then along comes Owens, upending their expectations by becoming the star of the Games (the film doesn’t mention it, but Germany actually won by far the most gold medals that year, although Owens star showing considerably overshadowed that accomplishment). As played by Stephan James, Owens is a towering figure of both athletic prowess and moral fortitude. There is an early stumble when he, like the fictional Roy Hobbs in The Natural (1984), is led astray from his sweet girl back home (Shanice Banton) by a worldly woman (Chantel Riley) who seduces him with her overt sexuality and her appreciation of his athleticism, but otherwise Owens is an upstanding figure. He might be a little too morally glossy for the cynics in the audience, but it’s hard not to like him and appreciate his strength of character. He absorbs racial hatred as well as Sidney Poitier ever did, but we also get to see him struggle with it, particularly in a lengthy conversation he has with Carl “Luz” Long (David Kross), the German athlete who is his main competitor in the long jump and whose discomfort with his country’s racial attitudes ultimately cost him a privileged position in the Reich.

There is another important character in the narrative, the great German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houten), who had previously made The Triumph of the Will (1934) documenting the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremburg and was hired by Hitler to document the Berlin Games. Riefenstahl occupies a particularly contested place in film history, as her undeniable cinematic genius has been forever tainted by her place as “Hitler’s favorite filmmaker.” There is still much debate as to how knowledgeable she was about Nazi policy, particularly the Final Solution, and how much guilt she should carry as the artist who turned a genocidal ideology into art, but Race is notably sympathetic in its portrayal of her. Screenwriters Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse paint her an artist first and foremost, dedicated to the job of making the greatest film she can about the Games while also giving her plenty of opportunity to demonstrate discomfort with her associates, particularly the grim-faced Goebbels, who at one point attempts to censor her filmmaking by ordering her crew not to film one of Owens’s races, lest it add to the obviousness of his athletic superiority. Riefenstahl is incensed and directly contradicts his orders, thus demonstrating that, for her at least, art trumps politics.

Director Stephen Hopkins, a veteran craftsman who has worked in virtually every genre thrown his way (his first big movie was the fifth installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, although he has spent the last few years producing and directing popular television series like 24 and House of Lies), plays things simple and straight, giving us just enough historical and dramatic complexity to avoid charges of overt hagiography. When he does get flashy, such as incorporating titles into the mise-en-scene by having the words angle along the lines of buildings and streets, it feels hokey and distracting. When he allows the film to play to its generous, old-fashioned strengths of celebrating determination and perseverance, it works quite nicely, especially in the way it reminds us that brilliant athletic talent and scandal don’t have to go hand in hand and that the heights of one’s achievement don’t necessarily have to be matched by the depth of one’s ego.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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Overall Rating: (3)




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