One Night in Miami (A Film Review by Collectivist)
Other than "Judas and and the Black Messiah" and "The U.S. vs Billie Holiday", "One Night in Miami" is the best movie I've seen so far in 2021. Initially, I was somewhat reluctant to see it, presuming that it would be another Hollywoodish whitewash of African American history, shallow at best.
Actually director Regina King has put together a decent cinematic character study based on a play with the same title, by Kemp Powers, that seriously grapples with one of the most important social and political phenomena of the 20th century: social justice. That struggle, in one way or the other, still rages in the 21st century.
Instead of a standard plot, the film revolves around a situation. . . In a segregated motel, one night in Miami, Florida, four prominent and popular African Americans meet to celebrate after one of them - a 22 year-old Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), soon-to-be Muhammad Ali - has just won the heavy weight boxing title. Who knew, at the time, that singular event would not only shake up the entire sports world, but also the world of politics?
We see Jim Brown (Aldous Hodge) the punishing star running back for the Cleveland Browns, now, considering a movie career; there's Sam Cooke ( Leslie Odom, Jr.), perhaps the greatest 'soul' singer of all time, just months before he's killed in another motel. . .And then there's the indomitable Malcolm X (Kingsly Ben Adir). The latter is in political transition, still torn, however, between the religious nationalism of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam and his own growing revolutionary, anti-imperialist nationalism. Although their subsequent irreconcilable rupture is often attributed to revelations of Muhammad's sexual indiscretions, anyone watching closely could discern the public political divergence coming faster than Clay's wicked left jab.
While Malcolm necessarily 'steals' the show, the film fails to show and place these unforgettable characters in the necessary global light, other than a few references to Ali's emerging opposition to the Vietnam War, which, when he refuses the draft a few years later, costs him the heavyweight crown.
The struggle for Civil/Human Rights was arguably at its apex in 1963. Major 'events' of that year include:
- the murder of NAACP leader Medgar Evers
- the assassination of President John F. Kennedy
- MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington
The struggle against white nationalism had become so antagonistic that some militant black freedom fighters were beginning to take up arms in self defense. On the international scene, plots were hatching almost weekly - from the U.S. - to destroy, by any means necessary, socialist reconstruction in Cuba, only 90 miles away from Miami. Americans and other soldiers were dying by the hundreds, daily, in an imperialist war in war in Southeast Asia. Consequently, an anti-war movement gradually developed. It was also the year Mao Zedong predicted that the black liberation movement would merge with the class struggle in the US. By the end of the 60s and the creation of the Black Panther Party, it clearly had.
Finally, "One Night in Miami" reminds us that African Americans, not unlike other social groups are hardly monolithic; which, dialectically, is the source of both our political strengths and weaknesses.
As an extra added treat, the film closes with a stirring version of "A Change is Gonna Come", by Odom, that would certainly make the late, great Sam Cooke very proud.
Sam Cooke - A Change Is Gonna Come (Official Lyric Video)
One Night in Miami Official Trailer
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