Movie Review: Shirley(2024)
The film Shirley is a depiction of the 1972 presidential campaign of Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to run for president. The film begins with Shirley as a congresswoman with her community in Brooklyn, and almost immediately jumps to her decision to run for president. The people helping run her campaign are then brought into focus, in particular her advisor, Mac. Mac, along with financier Stanley Townsed and the rest of the people running her campaign, are of the opinion that Shirley is too nuanced, too honest, and that she doesn’t say the things she needs to to be elected. This became a defining characteristic of Shirley, her refusal to, “Clean up,” her policies to make them more general to gain more votes and her distaste of backdoor politics. We see this when she’s questioned about her stance on the Black Panther party, and we see this again in her dealings with another political candidate, Walter Fauntroy. Fauntroy attempted to get Shirley to drop out of the primary in Washington D.C, even playing the black card, claiming that they would be splitting both the votes and the delegates, a situation that benefited neither of them. Shirley obliges, dropping out of the race in D.C, but it never sits right with her, as it went against her personal morals. Eventually, after this and other shady politics are on display, Shirley’s own backdoor politics come back to haunt her, as she is betrayed by both Fauntroy and Ron Delleums, her friend and fellow congressman. She is faced with the choice of enlarging the financial debt of her campaign on her supporters, or to accept her defeat and acknowledge the progress made for minorities in U.S politics made by her, and to hope that she is an inspiration to someone in the future, someone who could do what she could not: Win the presidency.
This biographical-picture of Shirley Chisholm’s campaign does a good job of showing what the public generally never sees in a campaign. From the hustle and bustle undertaken by Mac and her Head of Finance Arthur Hardwick, to her youth coordinator/lawyer Robert Gottlieb, suing the three major broadcasting companies in America, we see the inner workings of a campaign first hand. I do have a problem with the film however, particularly about the way they portray Shirley. I admit that I had no idea who she was before I saw the film, but I still feel that the film focuses too much on the adversity she faced as a black woman, rather than on her political policies. The movie skips 3 years of her time in congress, eliminating many chances for us to get to know Shirley as a politician, and to back up her decision to run for president. The movie never really shows the political side of Shirley, just her campaign and how she speaks for all of the American people; For someone so against political cliches used by other politicians to skirt on promises, the movie seems to hinge her campaign on that one. Hidden Figures, a similar movie about outstanding achievements by outstanding black women, shows a lot of the same adversity as Shirley, but fails to fall into the same traps because it shows its 3 main characters actually doing their jobs, and being phenomenal at them. Other than this glaring issue, I have no quarrels with the film. I just wish it was executed better.
Photo 1: N.G. Slater Corporation, From Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in the United States between 1929 and 1977, inclusive, without a copyright notice.
Photo 2: Unkown author, From Wikimedia Commons. This United States Congress image is in the public domain. This may be because it was taken by an employee of the Congress as part of that person’s official duties, or because it has been released into the public domain and posted on the official websites of a member of Congress. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain.