Film: RACE
Cast: Stephan James, Jason Sudeikis, Jeremy Irons, Shanice Banton, Carice van Houten, William Hurt, David Kross, Barnaby Metschuratt, Amanda Crew
Director: Stephen Hopkins
There was once a man named Jesse Owens who would singlehandedly demolish the notion of an Aryan Master Race and that black people are inferior to whites. Stephen Hopkins tells his story in “Race”. Skin colour is biological, race is a social construct. The greatest of ancient civilisations have all been coloured (Egyptian/Indian/Chinese) and white slavery existed till the 19th century. But try telling that to white supremacists. Sadly, even the Germans, who worshipped music and philosophy and should have known better, were brainwashed by a dolt (Hitler) with ideas of a Master Race lording it over their inferiors. Sounds familiar, closer home? Such is human nature. In the Germany of the 1930s when this movie is set, Jews were being rounded up and transported to work.
The viewer is shown this sad slice of German history in a scene or two in a dramatic story which highlights the historic win (FOUR GOLDS!) of the great black track star Jesse Owens, at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The Nazis would set up the infamous death camps in Poland only later. If this movie is short on Jewish suffering, let it be noted, the biopic skirts the horrendous treatment of blacks in America: The torture, beatings, rapes, lynching are marked by their absence in this
film which only shows segregation (blacks sitting at the rear of buses) or discrimination (using facilities last).
The Olympics didn’t change the social situation for Jesse on his return home. He and his wife had to use the service entrance of the hotel where he was being feted for his glorious achievements. Hopkins begins the movie with Jesse (Stephan James of SELMA which has yet to be released in India) as an undergrad at Ohio State University where he sets three world records in a single hour in 1935.
Seeing his potential, his coach, the former OSU track star, Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis) wants him to strike gold in the 1936 Olympics even as the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured Peoples (NAACP) tries to pressurise him to boycott the games because of Hitler’s anti-Semitism and racial policies.
Even the US Olympics committee president, Jeremiah Mahoney (William Hurt), wants America to stay away as a mark of protest against Hitler (Adrian Zwicker) and his Propaganda
Minister Goebbels (Barnaby Metschuratt, sinister) who want to glorify Nazism and Aryan superiority at the Olympics through documentaries directed by Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houten). It is pointed out that the Olympics will be so much the poorer without American participation.
Besides, can’t the Americans be described as hypocrites given their own bigoted history of racial discrimination? Finally, the Nazis agree to allow blacks and Jews at the Olympics, but succeed in excluding American Jewish athletes in a deal struck with former Olympics athlete Avery Brundage (Jeremy Irons) who later became head of the Olympic committee.
That the film has an aptly chosen title is clear from the way Race extols liberty and equality alongside courage, hard work, family, fraternity and the sporting spirit.
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