An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since there was a decent cast involved and since it was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, I had never heard of this true story and it was actually some fascinating material. Unfortunately, it’s a shame that the movie itself turned out to be rather weak though. The first issue was with the tone which was just too light-hearted for this complex material. Sure, some bits were emotional, as they should be, but I wish they went deeper on how such radically different people, even sworn enemies, could come together in such a fashion. What also bothered me was how they spent so much time to rehabilitate C.P. Ellis. Like I said before, it was actually a great story and the point was not to show who were the ‘good’ guys and who were the ‘bad’ guys but still, the guy was the head of the local Ku Klux Klan, for crying out loud. They kept hammering the fact that it was actually an average fellow who cared for this family but I find it hard to believe that, in all these years he was involved in this ‘organization’, he and his goons didn’t beat up some poor random black man because, well, that’s simply what they do. As a result, it was rather bewildering how they spent so much less time on Taraji P. Henson’s character who was basically reduced to a barking nuisance most of the time. A good example was the scene when Ann Atwater had to fix up a knocked down display of some Ku Klux Klan uniform. It was actually the very best scene in this movie, it was some powerful stuff and, yet, they did exactly nothing at all with this afterwards. Hell, even Mary Ellis, C.P.’s wife, was actually more developed than her character. One last thing that bothered me was the fact that, even though this charette thing was fascinating, everybody actually voted exactly the same way they would have before the charette took place (except obviously for C.P., but he had a change of hearts because this woman was coerced to change her vote, not really because of the charette), so what was the damned point? Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was still a really interesting story and I think it is worth a look, even if it could have been much better though. 

6/10