For liberals who regard the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency with residual suspicion, these are confusing times. While the FBI could once be dismissed as a haven for skull-crackers and fascists, today’s authorities largely limit themselves to monitoring Republican politicians and sniffing out white-bread y’all Qaeda types. Happily, the motion picture industry has hit upon a solution to liberals’ cognitive dissonance. If the Left can no longer heckle G-men in the present tense, it can do so via the magic of period filmmaking.
Set at the height of the Black Panther movement’s power and influence, Judas and the Black Messiah is an ideal vehicle for moviegoers who want to stop worrying and hate the pigs. The story of Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton’s betrayal at the hands of FBI informant William O’Neal, the film offers a narrative of such pristine moral simplicity that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Hampton borne away by angels in the climactic scene. As played by the skillful Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out, Widows), the student leader-turned-fire-breathing revolutionary is a selfless dreamer with the charisma of a tent revivalist. Of course his enemies, led by a monomaniacally racist J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen), are villains without redeeming qualities. Who else would dare to oppose such a man?
Judas and the Black Messiah opens on a Chicago evening in the late 1960s, and 17-year-old O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) is attempting to steal a car by impersonating a federal officer. Foiled in his effort and arrested shortly thereafter, O’Neal makes the acquaintance of actual agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), who offers to quash the charges against the young man in exchange for a bit of undercover work. Hampton, the bureau’s target, has already come to the FBI’s attention as a figure who might one day unite the Left’s insurgent elements under a single banner. In order to buy his freedom, O’Neal must infiltrate Hampton’s organization and feed information back to Mitchell and the authorities.
Proficiently directed by Shaka King (Newlyweeds) but shot from an underdeveloped script, the film uses O’Neal’s enforced surveillance primarily as an excuse to follow Hampton around as he moves through Chicago’s radical precincts. Audiences behold not only the Black Panther chairman’s famous “get a little satisfaction” speech (the transcript of which is helpfully available at Marxists.org) but also his forays into rival gang headquarters and community centers. That these scenes are surprisingly effective is due in large part to the work of Kaluuya, who manages to nail his character’s rhythms and intonations while transcending mere mimicry. Crucial to the actor’s success is his willingness to play Hampton as a contortionist, a man of firm principles who nevertheless saves his most outrageous rhetoric for crowds that need bucking up. The result is a historical portrayal that feels lived-in and layered despite the movie’s political didacticism.
If the same isn’t true of Stanfield’s rendering of O’Neal, the fault belongs to the screenplay far more than it does to the performer. Throughout Judas and the Black Messiah, viewers witness a great deal of the interaction between O’Neal and Mitchell but hardly anything concerning O’Neal’s relationship with Hampton. Though O’Neal and Mitchell’s exchanges are intriguing, and Plemons is characteristically excellent, the film’s focus deprives Stanfield of the ability to explore what must have been O’Neal’s agony. Audiences see the fear of prison time that keeps his character under Mitchell’s thumb. What they don’t see is sufficient evidence that betraying Hampton is a particularly heart-rending assignment.
Of the other coupling that drives the movie’s narrative, better things can be said. Attempting to expand his Illinois chapter, Hampton meets and befriends the young activist Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback), and the two soon fall in love. In addition to providing the film with a moving subplot, the pair’s burgeoning connection is necessarily subtler (and thus more interesting) than anything else happening onscreen. For a picture that is often schoolmasterish in tone, it serves as an indispensable humanizing element.
Lamentably, Judas and the Black Messiah seems determined to plant the bulk of its flags on more ideological ground, a decision that undermines both its accuracy and the breadth of its appeal. No one can argue, of course, that the FBI covered itself in glory during the Civil Rights era or that the conclusion of Hampton’s story was entirely just. Yet a movie that attributes its enemies’ actions to unadulterated bigotry — declining, for example, to consider why a Marxist organization might have been of special concern to the law enforcement during the Cold War — is not art but agitprop. Pol Pot would likely get fairer treatment from Hollywood than Hoover & Co. receive here.
In the end, however, an even graver omission may be the film’s failure to get inside the head of O’Neal, a man who ought to reside at the movie’s moral center but ends up being the void at its heart instead. “At least I had a point of view,” O’Neal asserted in a bizarre interview filmed shortly before his death. Exactly what that was, viewers of this picture may well wonder.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
