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(That his Klan identity is an open secret speaks volumes.) As a Klan leader, he’s connected to the head of the City Council (Bruce McGill) and to local business, and he represents the feelings of a significant subset of the white community. feels that attending the meeting will give him a better shot at sustaining segregation than not attending it. After an electrical fire threatens to shut down a local black elementary school, the issue of school integration rears its head (it is, after all, the law of the land), and C.P. So why would an avowed white supremacist who lives to spread terror agree to attend a civilized black-meets-white détente community summit like the one in “The Best of Enemies”? Because he feels like he has no choice. isn’t just a hater - he’s a man of violence. and his Klan buddies shoot up the home of a white woman who is dating a man they refer to by using the N-word (which gets thrown around a lot in this movie), and the writer-director, Robin Bissell, scores the scene to Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou,” giving it a pulp kick that feels out of place. He leads a life of quiet desperation, struggling to raise three quarrelsome kids (he also has a mentally impaired son who lives in the local psychiatric hospital), but in the Klan he’s both a leader and the twisted version of a life coach, presiding over legions of angry white men (who are well cast they look disturbingly ordinary) as well as a youth corps that he introduced to the organization.Įarly on, there’s one off note: C.P. By his own description, becoming part of that brotherhood of hate gave him purpose, solidarity, a cause higher than himself. is a chunky aging redneck family man who runs a filling station and feels, deep down, like one of life’s losers - or, at least, he did until he joined the Klan. Yet as you watch the performance you stop wondering: Even more than “Three Billboards,” “The Best of Enemies” is a study of the American racist mind-set.
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It may have a sentimental structure, but in tone it overlaps more than a bit with Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman,” because it’s driven by a comparable impulse: to show the sickness of racism from the inside out.Ĭonsidering that it was just two years ago that Sam Rockwell was celebrated for playing a racist cop who undergoes a similar conversion in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (a character that was also criticized, in a warmup to the wokeness that greeted “Green Book”), you may wonder why he took on this role so soon afterward. (This echoes one of the criticisms of “Green Book”: that it embedded racism in a design of nostalgia.) Toss in a lump-in-the-throat ending and you have a recipe for…what? A film to attack as morally myopic?Įxcept that “The Best of Enemies,” while not nearly as good as “Green Book,” is a rock-solid movie: squarely deliberate, a little long and predictable, but honest and thoughtful enough, precise in its period and locale, with very strong performances. It also unfolds in a comfortably distant past (in this case, nearly 50 years ago), when the prospect of a dyed-in-the-wool racist coming to embrace school integration is designed to make us feel good - even as our own era presents a tangle of racial conflict that’s not nearly so easily resolvable. While hardly a “white savior” movie, “The Best of Enemies” is yet another drama in which the cause of racial justice becomes a way for a white person to “grow.” In its very form, the film turns the primal sin of American racism into a “symmetrical” black/white problem. To me, though, what’s even more eyebrow-raising is that the film makes the transformation convincing.
#BEST OF ENEMIES DOCUMENTARY MOVIE#
(And pigs can fly, and Donald Trump intended his tax cut to help the middle class.) You can feel just how much this film is going to be hated in some quarters, and what those critics will say: that in 2019, the last thing America needs is a message movie about a Klansman who turns into a liberal Teddy bear. You watch “The Best of Enemies” and think: Is this really going to be the story of an avowed white supremacist, the sort of man who leads cross burnings and gun-blasting raids, who in a little over two hours of screen time sees his evil ideas fade and his icy heart melt to humanity? Well, yes, it is.