Trouble Man: ‘Malcolm X’ (1992)
It’s rare to see a film that bears the weight of history yet moves with the energy of personal urgency. Spike Lee had read and been inspired by The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) as early as junior high school, and although he’s always been somewhat vague, in interviews, about what it is in the book that initially inspired him, there’s nothing at all vague about the way his inspiration manifests itself on the screen.
It’s a redemption story of the highest order, because it’s a redemption story that doesn’t even reveal its true nature — the nature of its ultimate redemption — until we think we’ve already received the final redemption. When Malcolm Little in prison decides to turn away from his life of crime, devoting himself to the teachings of the Nation of Islam and being embraced by that community, it’s the first redemption. And in a lesser movie — in a lesser story — it could serve as the final one.
But Malcolm X puts another curve in our journey. It turns out that the community that once saved his life is now the very community threatening it, and so a story of redemption becomes a story of betrayal, and in this story, redemption must be found yet again. No circumstance could possibly make more meaningful that poignant lyric from Marvin Gaye’s “Trouble Man”:
I come apart, I had to win
Then start all over, and win again
Malcolm X had to keep on winning, and the stoic resolve with which he did so can’t help but inspire. There’s also plenty of inspiration to be found in the story of how Lee finally made his film of that life. He pulled what Malcolm would have called an okey-doke on Warner Bros., promising to deliver for $28 million a movie he knew was going to cost him some $33 million. Oh, well: by any means necessary — to use another Malcolmism. Lee’s friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola called this “getting the company pregnant”; his advice was to get the company committed and invested, and worry about the extra $5 million later.
Inevitably, Warner Bros. eventually handed budget oversight to a bond company, and, just as inevitably, the bond company eventually shut down the production. Lee asked himself, What would Malcolm do?, and arrived at the answer: Employ self-reliance. So he asked people for money. This isn’t as hypocritical as it at first sounds, in a business where churning up funding from anywhere outside the studio system — by whatever means — qualifies as self-reliance. So Lee went to black entertainers in America so rich and famous they went by single names: Magic, Michael, Prince, Cosby, and Oprah, as well as Janet Jackson, Tracy Chapman, and Peggy Cooper Cafritz. After he culled together funds from these contributors, along with $2 million of his own $3 million salary, Warners was shamed into opening up their own coffers. The film was back on, and it would be the film Lee had all along intended it to be — all 3 hours and 22 minutes, with no expense spared.
Not that this was the end of Lee’s Malcolm X troubles — far from it. Some of the troubles were self-generated, like when he requested of media outlets that they send only black reporters to interview him. Expanding his jurisdiction even further, he suggested that kids skip school to see his movie, as if theaters only operated between the hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m.
Some of the troubles were generated from without, such as the public misperception — in spite of responsible reviews — that Malcolm X promoted militancy and hate. This a priori response to the film only proved its necessity — proved that the work of Malcolm X was far from done. (X also, appropriately, was released amidst the riots that followed the acquittal of the police officers who’d participated in the Rodney King beating, footage of which serves as a kind of epigram to the film.)
And it wasn’t just whites who criticized X sight unseen. Members of the Nation of Islam were concerned about how their organization would be portrayed, especially given that the hero of the piece was not only someone who’d renounced the Nation by the end of his life, but whose end-of-life had come at the hands of certain of the Nation’s members.
Another reflexive critic was the radical black activist and writer Amiri Baraka, who even before seeing the script claimed that Lee was too bourgeois — in his upbringing, his education, his general sensibility — to properly tell the story of Malcolm X. When Baraka finally did read the script — a version that had leaked — his objections became even more adamant. Before shooting started, he was leading protests outside the various offices of 40 Acres and a Mule, Lee’s production company. He claimed Lee was in cahoots with the government in blaming Malcolm’s death on blacks, even though, as Lee correctly said, “It is well documented that the assassins came from a [Nation of Islam] mosque in Newark. We even put their names in the end credits.”
Many welcomed these accusations against Lee — of racism, of being out of touch — as a welcome administration of his own medicine — of chickens coming home to roost, to once again use the words of Malcolm X (who infamously used the phrase when responding to the JFK assassination). Well before Baraka declared Lee unfit for telling Malcolm’s story on the screen, Lee was doing the very same at the expense of Norman Jewison, the director first signed on by the producers to captain the project.
Lee’s sole reasons for doing so were racial in nature, but were they justified? Even though it’s obvious that a white director is qualified to tell Malcolm X’s story, Lee was able to accomplish certain things, as a black man, that a white director surely wouldn’t have. It would have been far harder for a white director to appease the Nation of Islam, which had made death threats and was promising to disrupt the shoot. Lee met with Farrakhan, receiving his blessing though he declined Farrakhan’s historical annotations to the script. Had the director been white, the Nation would have exerted much more of its thuggish power over the telling of the story, and we can be sure that this power would not have been exerted in the interest of truth.
So how much truth is there in Malcolm X? A lot more than one has any right to expect from the finite parameters of a single motion picture. There’s also a lot of historical accuracy, an even harder thing to achieve (and a thing too often confused with truth).
Just because Lee’s movie is based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X doesn’t mean it’s based on the life of Malcolm X. The Autobiography is itself a work of art, of narrative compression and retelling, and is therefore prone to the fallacies all such works are prone to. So it is that when Lee decided to exaggerate the extent of Malcolm’s criminal activities — to better emphasize the redemption that came later — he was exaggerating an exaggeration. The scholar Manning Marable writes in his magisterial biography of Malcolm X that “the memoirs written by friends and relatives have illustrated that the notorious outlaw Detroit Red character Malcolm presented in his autobiography is highly exaggerated. The actual criminal record of Malcolm Little for the years 1941–46 supports the contention that he deliberately built up his criminal record” in the Autobiography.
We could go on about this, just as we could go on about Malcolm’s inconsistent accounts of how exactly his father died (the more dramatic version is given in the film); all the real-life figures who helped comprise the character in X of Brother Baine (based largely on a much more fascinating person named Bembry, or “Bimbi” in the Autobiography); about a marriage considerably more turbulent than the one depicted in the film (Malcolm’s widow, Betty Shabazz, was a consultant on X).
We could go on about all of this, and we could have a lot of fun doing it, too. But the truth is, this sort of compositing and telescoping and bowdlerizing goes on in every biopic. Lee (with a considerable assist from screenwriter Arnold Perl) wisely chose his spots for doing so, and from there was able to employ all the many resources at his disposal for making a film of supreme style and vitality.
The opening musical number is a piece of bravura filmmaking in its own right, and for all its choreography and costumes and set design (this is a black ballroom in 1940s Boston), it was far from cheap. It was one of the very first things Lee shot, this sequence, for he wanted to put cast and crew on notice that Malcolm X was to be a movie of epic scale and expense, and that they should approach their work accordingly. While participating in an elaborately choreographed number in tribute to the Technicolor MGM musicals he admired so much, Lee as the character Shorty punctuates the whole thing with a slide toward the camera and a fourth-wall-disregarding stare into its lens — a most unlikely homage, but also weirdly appropriate, as if to demonstrate that this sort of celebration of bodily movement should have a place in black culture as well.
This was to be Ernest Dickerson’s last film as cinematographer, after which he would go on to a successful directorial career of his own. He and Lee, friends and collaborators since their film-school daze, feuded on the set over what Dickerson considered Lee’s encroachments on his territory. However the look of X was achieved, it remains an exquisite exemplar for how to photograph a historical epic.
“Philosophically, what we talked about first was getting the feeling of the forties, that zoot-suit period,” Dickerson explained to author Kaleem Aftab, laying the whole thing out.
We went for a Technicolor feel and then it was a little bit noirish because of the dark world that Malcolm Little was traveling in then. When he went to prison, I wanted to give him something that was really cold because all the warmth had gone from his life. It was monochromatic and balanced toward the blue side. After he met the Honorable Elijah Muhammad for the first time, that meant clarity and a sharpness of intent, so I went for a harder look. In Africa, I had a slight diffusion to show that Malcolm’s attitude had started to achieve a different feel.
Some of the moments in Malcolm X are genuine visual triumphs. There’s Malcolm in solitary confinement, the entire scene lit by a shaft of light from his cell door. There’s a golden-aura-ed Elijah Muhammad who appears before Malcolm as he reads his response to the letter Malcolm has sent.
There’s the Lee-trademark floating dolly shot, of Malcolm on his way to deliver a speech he’ll never finish — except the dolly shot is more resonant than usual, for the way it suggests Malcolm’s disassociation from his fear and the surreality of stepping toward suspected doom.
There’s Malcolm X going crazy by the phone as he sits in his hotel, knowing the Nation is now out to kill him, and, to suggest his mental turbulence even as he sits stone-still, the image of Malcolm’s face doing a disoriented counterclockwise 360 (pictured at the top of this essay). There’s the recreation of that famous photo of Malcolm X at his window, heavily armed and keeping an eye out for those terrorizing his family — a shot that starts out in black-and-white, like the original, but then transitions to color, to emphasize the act of history being brought to life.
It’s a serendipitous thing that the actor Ossie Davis, who’d by this point played in three Spike Lee Joints, had also been a friend of Malcolm X’s and even delivered the eulogy at his funeral. No production budget can buy that kind of confluence. When Lee asked Davis to reprise his eulogy — to read it over the archival footage that concludes the film — Davis wasn’t even sure at first that he wanted to. However, “I was persuaded that I should,” he said, “because whatever the film presented, whatever Spike had given us and whatever because of his youth Spike left out, I was speaking from my knowledge of the man and the moment.”
Giancarlo Esposito was also a Spike Lee regular. He played one of Malcolm X’s assassins, and his performance here is most notable in retrospect. A decade and a half before he would prove, as Gus Freling on Breaking Bad, that he could play a deceptively friendly killer, here he is, in the Audubon Ballroom, picking up a doll that Malcolm’s daughter has dropped and giving it back to her with a smile, just moments before he would kill her father. It could be Gus Freling saying the lines: “You’re welcome, my beautiful sister.”
Not enough could ever be said about Washington’s performance, easily one of the very best of the 1990s. He’d first played Malcolm X in the early ’80s, when he starred in a play called When the Chickens Come Home to Roost, in which he’d had to depict only one of the Malcolms — the mature, embattled Malcolm, recently on the outs with the Nation; in Lee’s film, he would have to play all the Malcolms since after childhood. He spent a full year before principal photography preparing for the role — abstaining from pork, studying the Koran, conducting biographical research. He wanted to get as close to Malcolm’s essence as he could, in ways that transcended mere mimicry and physical resemblance.
And so he plays zoot-suited Malcolm: dumb and innocent and fresh from the country, always grinning and dancing. He plays street-hustler Malcolm: addicted, reckless, desperate. He plays inmate Malcolm: hardened and studious and on the verge of wisdom. He plays enlightened Malcolm: a commanding orator, earnest and self-contained, driven by purpose. He plays, once again, embattled Malcolm: betrayed, fearless but tense, righteous and on the verge of a newer wisdom. And then, finally, he plays the last Malcolm there would ever be: the one who’d attained inner peace as well as acceptance of so many things — of not only the white race and the limits of ideological dogma, but of his own impending doom. Washington plays the role like someone who understands that winning once won’t be nearly enough.
