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Crouching Panther, Hidden Agenda
Judas and the Black Messiah is "based on a true story", which immediately sets one's Truth Squad into overdrive to see just how far afield the fiction is from reality. Such cynicism is matched, but then surpassed, when one learns that the movie is pretty much true, and that it happened very nearly exactly how it's depicted, just as the more pessimistic among us might suspect it did. One takes no joy in this, no sense of triumph that "they did it right for once," but only the despairing attitude that the truth of it is not stranger than an audience might accept (the standard trope for altering a story), but that it is altogether what they've become accustomed to accept.
That's a tellingly depressing bar to admit. But, we're a nation that excels at complacency when it's not in our immediate backyard.
Further still, the truth is actually more stunning than what is portrayed in the movie, and we'll address that fact at the end, because it weighs on the incidents like a stone, evoking feelings of amazement, pride, and shame.
The devil he owes comes in the form of J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen, who, despite being encased in even more makeup than Leonardo Di Caprio had to endure, is still unconvincing), who, in what should have been his gay, twilight years as head of the FBI, is seeing his black-and-white world of gangsters, racketeers and "Reds" become a bit more nuanced in the form of generations of "Boomers" becoming disenchanted with the "System," the "bread and circuses" not seeming to be enough to distract them. It runs afoul of his agency, which is comprised of white, crew-cut (and presumably straight) men in business suits—but we see them drinking on the job in their offices (would that pass Hoover's scrutiny?).His concern, right now, is black nationalist groups, like the NAACP, the SCLC, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panthers—not only due to their threat to the white status quo, but also for relations to communist and socialist causes.*
Their target is Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), who has become the leader of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, after studying pre-law and serving as a Youth Council leader of the NAACP. Naturally charismatic, a powerful speaker, and a student of revolutionary technique, Hampton began by organizing political classrooms, a civilian program for supervising police activity as well as a Free Breakfast Program. But, his biggest achievement—one which surely must not have escaped the notice of the FBI—is that he has organized what he called a "Rainbow Coalition," uniting the Panthers, the disparate Chicago street gangs, the White Southern Young Patriots Organization, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords. Nothing scares an established authority more than a united coalition of dissidents.
The FBI will begin their own disinformation campaign to splinter the Coalition, but their ace is Bill O'Neill, who will infiltrate the Panthers, and winning the begrudging trust of Hampton, eventually become the Security Captain of the Chicago chapter. He will maintain his hustler's stance, only going so far as until his life is at risk, but even then, when the FBI puts the pressure on him between doing something he's loathe to do and spending time in prison, he will do as ordered. It's just that he has no idea the limits the FBI will go to, whereas he might feel unironically safer under the umbrella of Hampton and the Panthers.
All this is laid out by King in as unobtrusive a way as possible, getting the details right, making his shots as if a documentary filmmaker with extraordinary access, with a cutting style that favors reaction shots and a gradual acceleration of tension. The cast is amazing: Stanfield has the wary look of someone being continually hunted; Kaluuya is always amazing to watch because his choices catch you by surprise—his Hampton is charismatic, but the way Pacino's early days as Michael Corleone are charismatic, walking into every room, surveying it, and then taking it over by sheer force of personality, even cunning; and Dominique Fishback is all knowing-eyes as Panther volunteer Deborah Johnson, who starts out questioning Hampton's rhetorical skills and ends up becoming his muse and lover.
One fact haunts: at the time of his death, Fred Hampton was 21 years old. Bill O'Neil had been recruited at the age of 17; he was 20 at the time of Hampton's assassination. There is no other way to look at the story than as a tragedy, of potential, unused and misdirected. Of lives wasted and power corrupted.
Judas and the Black Messiah is a devastating indictment.
* But, it's also personal for the FBI's director: In one scene, one of the few featuring the FBI director that has any resonance, director King has Hoover sanctimoniously ask Plemons' agent "How would you fee-el...if your daughter brought home her black boyfriend?" The agent can only stammer back at him: "She's eight months OLD!"
