THE GREAT DEBATERS....

It is not often that a movie is such a crowd-pleaser that the audience responds with tumultuous applause not once but numerous times. That is the kind of reaction Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters inspired when I saw it. Yes, the movie follows some tried and true underdog movie conventions but rarely is it done so skillfully that it does not wait until the final deciding match to provide small moral triumphs along the way to have people stand up and cheer.

The movie pull all of these strands together into a story that teaches that the journey to win should really be the means to the end of educating oneself and others to think morally and without racial prejudice or discrimination. The dialogue, which needs to be eloquent in a movie about debates, is contributive to many of the film’s well-timed and paced triumphant emotional moments within the Wiley team’s arguments that challenge for the resolutions of issues we now take for granted such as racial integration in colleges (though there could have been a more unpredictable, dimensional challenge if they had to argue for something they don’t believe in, as real debaters sometimes have to do). The debating atmosphere is also enriched in the conversations within the team as everyone seems to be talking in the cultural code of argument and rhetoric throughout (as when Tolson explains the origin of the word, lynching to the team).

By the end of the film, I found myself caring so much about these vivid characters in this time and place that I actually would have found the story equally satisfying and uplifting whether the team won or not. Of course, most stories about underdogs are told because they satiate our natural desires for the longshots to triumph but the great ones make you feel that you care for them as individuals more than the outcome. Seeing these people have the will to challenge the harsh times they lived in was enough to make me cheer for their moral victory, before their historically important, visible one.