A contemporary biopic such as Netflix’s Shirley, about the late New York congresswoman Shirley Chisholm (who served seven terms from 1969 to 1983 and died in 2005), should help us understand something about the evolution of her successors. We want to know the ethical and ethnic background renounced by so many black female members of Congress and Senate today — women who renounce Chisholm’s civil-rights-era Christian virtues and liberal decorum to become hardline socialist-leaning termagants.
That question must haunt the pair — director-writer John Ridley and his star Regina King — who collaborated on this sometimes touching but fence-sitting portrayal of Chisholm. In its first half, Ridley follows Hollywood’s modish social-justice-warrior formula, but then a few small moments of personality appear — as if Ridley suddenly remembered to particularize his subject. An early fish-out-of-water scene shows Chisholm in the Capitol warning a white elected bigot, weaponizing a modern cliché: “I’m paving the way for a lot of people looking like me being elected to Congress!”
As Shirley goes on, King’s Chisholm displays unexpected but fact-based traits of Christian faith — a far cry from the maniacal, secular agenda of Black Lives Matter — as when she insists on visiting Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace, who is hospitalized after an assassination attempt. And later, she absolves her former mentor, California congressman Ron Dellums, for personally betraying her. Both moments are a shock to the sanctimonious, liberal-racist Hollywood system.
This makes Shirley an uneven biopic that teeters between BLM stereotypes and the filmmakers’ own self-consciousness.
After Ridley won an Oscar for the torture-porn screenplay of 12 Years a Slave, I expected more of the same claptrap. And I feared worse from King, the once affable ingénue of TV’s 227 comedy series. As an adult, she gives off race-martyr airs: winning an Oscar as an unlikely social-warrior matriarch in If Beale Street Could Talk; playing a shape-shifting, race-baiting superheroine in HBO’s Watchmen series; making her directorial debut with the factitious multi-celebrity biopic One Night in Miami, in which Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke supposedly enjoy a heart-to-heart summit meeting.
Yet, midway through Shirley, both Ridley and King seem to have finally realized their folly and, like responsible pop artists, give Chisholm flashes of integrity and complexity. Those Wallace and Dellums moments stand out.
Thankfully, there’s no sign of the twisted, defensive, loudmouth race-baiting that marks the legislative misbehavior of Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee, Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, and their ilk in Regina King’s salutary portrayal. King uses a Barbados accent, conveying Chisholm’s ex-schoolteacher self-assurance as a defining idiosyncrasy. Chisholm’s risky, optimistic decision to run for president in 1972 unleashes the harsh games-playing of big-time politics as never before, testing her mettle and exposing the field’s treachery. It’s child’s play compared with today’s political warfare, but Chisholm’s enlightenment about party-wide deceit teaches a lesson now lost on Millennial media-activists who either don’t dare reveal the dishonesty behind black politics or contribute to it. (King is surrounded by credibly appealing actors Michael Cherrie as Chisholm’s husband and Terrence Howard, Lucas Hedges, and Lance Riddick as her smart and virtuous team.)
It’s an unusually revealing moment when Chisholm faces her unpopularity among black politicos who are beholden to lobbyists and power brokers. Needing their support, and unable to ignore their venality, Chisholm gives a speech forcing the black delegation at the Democratic Party convention to confront their deceptions: She cautions them to not waste their one vote!
A movie like Shirley comes from Hollywood’s default biopic mode for black people — highly ironic for an industry supposedly devoted to DIE (diversity, inclusion, equity). Black historical figures get Hollyweird treatment for their fame rather than their humanity because film-industry liberals still can’t countenance regular black Americans. No wonder this biopic has the uninspired title Shirley — with no exclamation point like a Broadway musical, yet so plain that it seems a cipher.
The media’s insistence on portraying blacks as victimhood statistics lines up with the Democratic Party’s hold on black politicians and the black electorate. It’s the same problem in Ava DuVernay’s SJW films (the awful When They See Us and Origin) and the problem that Chisholm attempts to dispel. Ridley and King wrestle with the new segregationist canard, going as far as they could to expose that taboo — and to honor Chisholm’s individuality.