http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117942284.html?categoryid=31&cs=1
By ANDREW BARKER
Feb. 22, 2010
A Firelight Media production for American Experience. Produced by
Laurens Grant, Stanley Nelson. Executive producer, Mark Samels.
Directed, written by Stanley Nelson, based in part on a book by
Raymond Arsenault.
With: John Lewis, Genevieve Houghton, Mae Frances Moultrie, Jerry
Ivor Moore, Raymond Arsenault, Diane Nash, Charles Person, John
Seigenthaler, John Patterson, Julian Bond, Jim Zwerg, Catherine
Burks-Brooks.Narrator: Stanley Nelson.
Stripping away the platitudes and feel-good generalizations of so
many civil-rights documentaries, Stanley Nelson's "Freedom Riders" is
a superb piece of filmic journalism. As it recounts the often
astonishing story of the titular activists with a flair for telling
details and a visceral degree of suspense, the pic declines to
exploit the events for a quick motivational hit, and it's ultimately
all the more inspiring for it. A Sundance entry slated for a run on
PBS, the docu should have long, healthy life in ancillary.
The story of the Freedom Riders movement is one which which most
Americans are familiar, in part thanks to a segment on the PBS
civil-rights docu series "Eyes on the Prize." But the more deeply one
delves into the story of these integrationists' activism through the
segregated South, the more improbable the whole saga may seem to
those who didn't live through it.
In 1961, two groups of activists, consisting of blacks and whites,
from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), set off from Washington,
D.C., on interstate bus lines bound for New Orleans, with the
intention of provoking local segregation laws by riding, eating and
lodging together. Things went smoothly until the buses reached
Alabama, where they were each attacked by mobs in separate incidents;
the buses were destroyed, and the riders badly beaten.
With the CORE riders halted, a new group of activists from a
different organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, set off from Nashville to provide re-enforcements. From
there, the story takes an increasingly amazing series of turns --
there are secret latenight limousine rides to the state lines, a
potentially psychotic police chief conspiring with the Ku Klux Klan,
a governor in hiding, power struggles between the Kennedy
administration and state officials, bomb threats, shifty FBI
informants, postal workers outfitted as state marshals,
unconstitutional imprisonments and several last-second escapes -- all
culminating in an act of national solidarity that would seem
impossibly over-the-top had it been written into a fiction film.
Narrating the events in day-by-day segments, Nelson is masterful at
conveying the activists' actual experience -- a combination of
uncertainty, exhilaration and abject terror -- as well as
underscoring the extreme danger in which they knowingly placed
themselves. Interviews with riders, Kennedy aides and witnesses are
emotional and far-ranging, and segregationist Alabama Gov. John
Patterson even appears to defend himself with a rascally sense
mischief that would be almost charming, were it not so despicable.
Pic is not interested in deification: The Kennedys might have been
sympathetic to the civil-rights movement, but they were not above
selling out the riders to state authorities in the interest of
political expediency. And even Martin Luther King Jr. is shown to
have "feet of clay," as the film puts it, when he supports the riders
in public and then privately offers unconvincing reasons for not
joining them. Yet that's part and parcel of the film's clear yet
unspoken message: the ability of ordinary people to effect great social change.
On a technical level, the pic is assembled with great skill, and the
archival footage and photography is extensive and surprising --
including everything from Czechoslovakian state news reports to film
footage of King and the riders trapped inside a church while a mob
rages outside.
Camera (color/B&W), Robert Shepard; editors, Lewis Erskine, Aljernon
Tunsil; music, Tom Phillips; music supervisor, Rena Kosersky; sound
designer, Margaret Crimons; associate producer, Stacey Holman.
Reviewed at Pan-African Film Festival (closer), Culver City, Feb. 17,
2010. (In Sundance Film Festival -- competing.) Running time: 115 MIN.
.
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