Royal Mess: HARRY & MEGHAN: ESCAPING THE PALACE

It’s plain to see why Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have become a most fascinating celebrity story of our time. It has everything: tragic backstory, complicated family dynamics, international politics, conversations of privilege and empire, race and class, royalty and, yes, romance. The youngest son of the tragically killed Princess Diana, the party boy veteran settles down after falling for a biracial American actress. It’s quite a story, even if that’s as far as it went. Marrying into the ongoing tabloid soap opera that is the royal family, however, sadly guarantees that’s not the end of it. In the disreputable genre of ripped-from-the-headlines made-for-TV movies, the whole complicated narrative is obvious grist for vaguely-lookalike unknown performers to get made up and reenact moments we read in tabloids. Lifetime, the leading purveyor of this once more prevalent genre, has now done it three times. And the third time is something like the charm because it finally has enough story, and permission from recent revelations, to lean all the more heavily into scandal roiling with suspense and emotional upheaval.

Thank Oprah for that. Her widely seen primetime CBS interview with the couple remains one of the most captivating TV moments of the year. Impeccably staged and probingly candid—albeit still carefully managed—and given the space to go on in detail, the former talk-show host proved she still had the considerable presence and skill she developed over decades in this space. She allowed Harry and Meghan to present a united front, speaking openly and guardedly about issues with the family. Racist comments toward their children. Unfair treatment in security and publicity. A lack of concern for their emotional and psychological well-being. Oprah’s reputation as a facilitator of Important Conversations, and the sagacity with which her every furrowed brow and nodding head—there’s no better listener on TV—and turn of phrase—“Were you silent or silenced?” was an instant classic—contains lent gravitas and believability to their captivating revelations. (It also made me wish Oprah did this more often. We’re not exactly overflowing with good interviewers anywhere these days.) These stories didn’t come out of nowhere. The couple had already stepped back from their royal status, a turn which followed a rabidly racist English tabloid culture and off-the-record reports of palace discord. It’s not news to hear stories like this leak from the place, but the source made it all the more persuasive.

So without that confirmed reporting from their mouths, it’s no wonder Lifetime’s earlier attempts to dramatize their lives flailed. In 2018’s Harry & Meghan: A Royal Romance, a pretty tepid rom-com filled time on the network’s schedule. It made the whole thing dewey-eyed in the most mechanical ways, and hand-waved the real issues in the mix. The movie has Harry coo sympathetically that he understands the Black experience because he has red hair, and ends with the grandmotherly Queen telling her staff it’s okay Meghan is Black. The network’s sequel, 2019’s Harry & Meghan: Becoming Royal is a feature-length montage of made-up moments tepidly staged and flatly developed. Best is probably a little arc with a fake British morning show as the bobble-headed hosts slowly diverge—one representing the scoffing white male prejudice, the other a woman who reaches her breaking point with him. Both films are pretty bland with makeup slathered on like a thick polish and every scene lit like an IKEA showroom. It’s pretty clear the filmmakers had a tight budget and cramped ideas, with little insight into what to do with the story at hand. They didn’t really know what they were telling. Turns out, it was because we didn’t have all the information.

Harry & Meghan: Escaping the Palace is a different beast entirely. It grabs the throat right away, with a revving engine over black, a smash cut to a car crushed in a Parisian tunnel. It understands the stakes at play. Turns out it's a dream sequence. It’s Meghan in the car. Harry sits up in bed sweating, with the gasping fear that accompanies every such scene you’ve ever seen. One could call this tasteless, but it’s also out to joltingly embody the Oprah special’s implications. Here’s a man in love with a woman who he increasingly fears is doomed to the same fate as his late mother. He sees the same swirl of factors brewing on the horizon. Most of the movie isn’t as dramatic as its opening, but is still plenty invested in the drama, the sense of real people in all the news. It stands up the conflicts and allegations with a subtext-less verve. Subtle, it’s not. But it is restrained and respectful, with even that attention-grabbing, controversy-courting opening intended to be fair to the real motivations of real people. Those looking to be superior to the form will certainly find plenty at which to scoff. And it certainly would not stand up to scrutiny if you put it next to a big-budget theatrical standard. But connoisseurs of the TV movie will recognize its flat-footed charms.

Returning director Menhaj Huda makes it with the same bland wallpapering of muzak-ish score, stock footage establishing shots, and simple, brightly lit staging as the previous films. But the acting chews into meatier scenes, with meaner personality clashes and tightly navigated discomforts. And there’s an underlying tension to the conflicts that build up a head of pressure on the family drama. Huda matches it with some pushier camera moves and snappier cutting. We see negotiations between family and fame, palace politics and brand management, and the gilded cage of their privilege as they yearn to break free. The heartbroken and the greedy alike plot and snipe, behind each other’s backs, of course. (There’s also a cavalcade of other dilemmas, from Prince Andrew to the pandemic.) There are relentlessly ironic juxtapositions and manipulatively positioned flashbacks to Princess Di for counterpoints. And the sense of royal fragility cooks up fine fissures of melodrama. I enjoyed it in the junk food way it’s intended, turning a real recent news story into a fast-paced tabloid tale gratefully committed to energetically recreating the juicy details without quite losing the human feeling inside. It’s about as good as this quick, cheap, surface-level production could be. But it’s also worth noting the Oprah interview did more in a conversation than this movie does in all its well-intentioned hustle.

A Change is Gonna Come: SELMA

Whatever their individual merits, or lack thereof, Hollywood reflections on the Civil Rights Movement from the likes of Driving Miss Daisy or The Help tend to conclude by putting on a happy face. They’re viewing the tribulations of the time through a historical distancing complex that takes great pride finding history in the past. How terrible racism and its effects, they say. And yet situating a story as vital as a fight for human rights through the view of sympathetic white help, told firmly from a supposedly more enlightened present, provides only uplift. One whose knowledge of history comes only from Hollywood could be excused for thinking the story of Civil Rights is the mission-accomplished post-racism lie sold by the willfully ignorant.

The power of a film like Ava DuVernay’s Selma comes in its restoring to history its devastating immediacy, while refusing to obscure the direct line from then to now. It takes as its subject the 1965 marches for voting rights in Selma, Alabama. That was a mere 50 years ago, when brave peaceful protesters were beaten by eager police in riot gear, in front of news cameras for the entire world to see. In this film, each blow feels fresh, the bruises still painful. It keeps the focus of a heroic, historic moment rooted in the humane details, presenting key figures as complicated human beings confronting the worst of humanity with hard-fought grace and determination. It’s a film that plays on your historical knowledge – you can’t watch an opening scene of little girls in their Sunday best walking through a church without a sick feeling of dread suspecting their fate – without taking it for granted or softening historical horror with the benefits of hindsight.

Every choice made by the filmmakers is rooted in immediacy and intimacy. They take our usual view of history – of Great Men, Important Speeches, and Big Moments – and restore a sense of the masses to a movement. The Civil Rights Movement was, after all, made up of people, hundreds and thousands of individuals whose collective voice was heard. The marches at Selma may have been organized and inspired by, among others, Martin Luther King Jr, but he needed the passion and commitment of the people who made up the crowds. DuVernay’s film’s most powerful moments are in its crowd scenes, when King (played brilliantly and convincingly by David Oyelowo) is simply one of many marching towards crowds of cops and hecklers, determined to draw attention to their cause.

Placing the crowds and King on similar levels of focus, the film draws a lively and humane reenactment. We come to recognize faces (Oprah Winfrey, Common, Lorraine Toussaint, Tessa Thompson, Stephan James, and more). We can pick them out in the crowds. We know a little of their stories. We see their eagerness, their idealism, their pragmatic planning. Then we see them shoved, hit, shot at, and bludgeoned. Their faces are bloodied as they limp to safety, ready to head out and march again the next day. At its best, Selma is history written with lightening, sharply revealing and an electric burn. It burns for the ferocity of the facts, and the sad recognition in them of so many concerns that linger still. When an unarmed black man is gunned down by white cops who will never be punished, it’s hard not to read echoes of current events in the pain and sorrow on the screen.

Writer-director DuVernay’s previous films were small-scale intimate dramas, tenderly studying the emotional currents between her characters. You can see that skill in Selma’s portrait of King’s relationship with his wife (Carmen Ejogo) and closest advisors (Wendell Pierce chief among them). Not just the easily appropriated, endlessly quotable symbol to which he can so often be reduced, we see King at a recognizably human level. He heads to the streets, ready to face death threats and worse as he delivers sermons with fire and conviction, no matter his private troubles and doubts. But we also see in the small, quiet moments of his life as husband, father, and friend, soft intimate spaces over which hangs the import and danger of his righteous calling.

The film is more diffuse than a biopic, and the time with the supporting cast doesn’t allow for any one standout amongst them. King still dominates the proceedings, drawing focus even when not on screen. He’s a figure of inspiration and conflict amongst everyone, but it’s always clear he’s only human. It’s a picture of a person, and of a movement, that manages to be honest without tearing anyone down. Following backroom negotiations, strategy sessions, and heartfelt speeches between moments of extreme racial tension and sympathetically drawn character moments, Selma is best when it’s witnessing the crisis points of the conflict, and when sitting back with the activists in casual moments of camaraderie, eating, praying, or singing while planning the next move. In those cases, DuVernay makes a film most clearly interested in the human experience first, not just the Big Important moments.

The film falls into some conventional docudrama patterns, like unnecessary time-stamped text and a few clumsy integrations of full names and position statements, orienting the audience at the (brief) expense of immediacy. So, too, the scenes in the White House with LBJ (Tom Wilkinson) or the State Capital where George Wallace (Tim Roth) growls and spits slurs, sequences which sit at a remove from the street-level interest. But when the story and the filmmaking sits powerfully close to the planning and the protests, it is too vitally alive to be held back entirely by such predictable based-on-a-true-story message movie moments.

Bradford Young’s cinematography finds glowing skin tones in cozy interiors that crackle with dimly-lit beauty reminiscent of Gordon Willis. But then we head outside with the protestors, where under the bright light of the sun, angry, violent racism must inevitably meet non-violence. The emotions of real people who somehow muster the courage to put themselves in harms way for what they believe are beautifully realized in a present tense, shorn from the usual feel-good conclusions. This is a hard-hitting view of these events, sympathetic and inspiring, but also pragmatic and clear-eyed about how hard-fought the battle, how real the accomplishments, and yet how ongoing the conflict.

Backstairs at the White House: THE BUTLER

In The Butler, director Lee Daniels recreates the Civil Rights movement in the guise of stirringly personal melodrama. A key scene revolves around the dinner table of a middle class black family in Washington D.C some time in 1968. The Freedom Rider son snipes at his parents when they express admiration for Sidney Poitier. He’s breaking down barriers, they say. He’s doing so by “acting white,” their son snaps. How thrilling it is to see this conversation play out not only on the big screen, but in a big, star-studded Hollywood film that’s for once seriously interested in the 50s, 60s, and 70s from the perspective of African American lives without feeling the need to hedge bets and shoehorn in a white perspective or reduce the black experience of the period into talking points and homogenous unity. That the film is messy and ungainly in many respects is only an outgrowth of its seriousness of intent, the depth of its inquisitive mournfulness, and the commitment it has to wrangling differing viewpoints into a sweeping, decades-spanning story of one man’s humble job as one of many butlers in the White House.

That man is Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker). Born to sharecroppers in the Deep South in the 1920s, he witnessed the death of his father at the hands of a snarling white farmer. Once grown, he leaves to find work, eventually ending up in a prestigious Washington, D.C. hotel. From there he’s eventually invited to interview for a position on the staff of the White House during the Eisenhower administration. He’s hired as a butler, a position he will keep for over thirty years and seven presidents. Whitaker, appearing meek and small in his broad frame, moves deliberately. He plays a man who takes great pride in his job and finds great success in it, moving between the backstage world of the house, chatting with his black colleagues (Cuba Gooding Jr. and Lenny Kravitz) in back rooms before putting on unrevealing public faces to walk out into the Oval Office and state dinners alike, ready to serve at a moment’s notice. If it weren’t for the politics half-overheard, the news on the TVs and radio, and the changing fashions, one gets a sense that Cecil could very well stay in this job and let the 20th century pass him by.

Yet that’s a choice he cannot make for himself. He’s a part of the times whether he wants to be or not. Cecil’s wife (Oprah Winfrey) is introduced in a scene that finds her commiserating with great sadness about the death of Emmett Till. The turbulence of the Civil Rights movement is inescapable. Soon, his oldest son (David Oyelowo, in a great performance that takes his character from a teenager to a middle-aged man) becomes a civil rights fighter, allowing the film some stirring cross-cutting between the butler’s daily tasks and the most notable moments of the civil rights struggle, none more powerful than the banquet juxtaposed against a lunch counter sit-in. His son becomes a more socio-politically honest Forrest Gump, a first-hand eyewitness to history at every turn, but full of agency and conviction that leads him there. He’s a driver of events, not a mere spectator, to sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and Black Panthers, even at one point sitting in a Birmingham jail cell down the row from where Martin Luther King Jr. would be writing his famous letter.

It’s the tensions in this father-son relationship that drive a good chunk of the film, a reflection of divides within America and within the African American community. The son has an approach to current events that often clashes with the accommodating, personal views of the various administrations that his father often has. As the volatile 60s curdle into the 70s, Cecil simply can’t ignore the situations unfolding around him. The political is undoubtedly and inescapably personal. As he moves with a tray of refreshments into the background in rooms of power, where white men make decisions about race while the black man walks silently through the scene, it’s an image that’s oft repeated and makes quiet points about the nature of power and access to true understanding about racial issues. When a white politician ruminates about what should be done about “Negro problems,” no one even seems to notice the black butler silently slipping out of the room. There’s rich subtext here about the variety of ways racial barriers are both erected and chipped away.

The march of presidents and the march of cameos playing them is at once broad and matter-of-fact. It’s a feast of over-cooked accent work, wigs and sculpted putty noses and jowls. Through Eisenhower (Robin Williams), Kennedy (James Marsden), Johnson (Liev Schreiber), Nixon (John Cusack), and Reagan (Alan Rickman) – Ford and Carter are left for file footage to portray – Cecil works in close proximity to men of power and historical interest. But they’re never more than broad sound bites and brief impressions in Danny Strong’s screenplay. They may be important people, but they are the least convincing aspect of the film. Similarly, the Big Events of the era pass by with the flatly unimaginative, albeit dramatically effective, progression of a history report. The Butler is best in scenes of loose and unhurried interactions between characters of middle- and working-class: the butlers, neighbors (like Terrence Howard), and students (like Yaya Dacosta). This becomes a film not about a man and the presidents he served, but about a man and his family, buffeted by the course of history while entangled in their own interpersonal dramas.

Lee Daniels, a hammy director if there ever was one, makes bold and oftentimes inexplicable choices. After two terribly nutso productions (Shadowboxer and The Paperboy) and an overdetermined miserabilist drama (Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire), he’s found the most purpose and focus he’s yet been able to muster while still retaining his always interesting personality. He’s the kind of director who’d rather fail trying something unexpected than play it safe. That’s why, even when it may be hard to enjoy one of his films, it’s rarely easy to dismiss it entirely. He starts The Butler with a shot of two lynched black men dangling from a tree, an American flag waving in the background, while a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. fades up on the side of the image. It’s stark and startling, butting up against our first look at Forest Whitaker dressed for duty and sitting in a White House corridor before flashing back to his childhood. Right away, Daniels tells us his intent to show us the life of a man against the backdrop of larger historical and symbolic concerns. And yet the movie works both erratically and well for keeping the larger concerns confined to the background, flavoring without taking over, only erupting when they most directly intersect with the lives of the butler and his family. It’s like Eyes on the Prize plays out as a backdrop for one family’s quintessentially 60s and 70s problems.

This causes for some strained and wandering filmmaking that at worst keeps context a mere dusting, but at best finds rich resonances, especially in the two lead performances. Whitaker’s steady, wise, slowly evolving portrayal of a quietly strong man is a great anchor. It’s a deceptively static performance that gathers unexpected riches the longer the film rolls. Winfrey, for her part, is a dynamic presence on screen. Decades of her status as talk show royalty have clouded the public’s memory of her real and genuine qualities as an actress. She has boundless charisma and incredible emotional force. Here she’s playing a woman who loves her husband deeply and truly, but doesn’t stop gathering tensions and jealousies, great disappointments and great pride. She loves her family and her life and yet still wishes for more. As her character gathers struggles of her own, Winfrey plays a symphony of melodrama, compelling all the way. One of my favorite scenes in the film finds her dancing alone to Soul Train in a scene that starts endearingly silly and eventually finds its way to sudden funk-scored tragedy. In another she drunkenly drawls superficial questions about Jackie Kennedy (in her state she pronounces it “Jackée”), digging for gossip from her placid husband’s steadfast commitment to confidentiality. What works best about the film is how Whitaker and Winfrey’s performances contain unspoken conflicts and resolutions that sneak past the film’s sometimes-overdetermined messaging and heavy-handed narration. 

The film goes this way and that as emotions and ages make leaps and bounds. The film is overstuffed, overflowing with dramatic points of interest and subplots that surge, take over, and fade away to maybe return again. It’s the kind of film that is directed in five or six directions at once, square and impressionistic, corny and evocative, comedic and deadly serious. Daniels stages Big National Events loudly and emphatically while personal and political scenes play tenderly and with ellipsis. I particularly enjoyed a very small, slowly simmering subplot between Winfrey and Howard that fleetingly feels like a cousin to Wong Kar Wai by way of Douglas Sirk. Daniels is a director who works not only with melodrama, but also with an awareness of a variety of types of melodrama. It’s a film of resonant surface detail and deeply moving implications. It doesn’t all fit together, but that’s part of what makes it compelling. This isn’t a film that makes oversized claims of historical import about the individuals, but rather illuminates the importance of the individual in society’s evolution.