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John Ridley’s hard-hitting drama looks at Chisholm’s groundbreaking campaign from the inside out.
At first glance, Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 presidential campaign was the definition of quixotic. She was 47 years old; At the time, she had only served one term (starting in 1968) as the first black woman elected to Congress. (Her district centered on the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.) To say Chisholm wasn’t an experienced player from Washington, DC would be putting it mildly. And her I look like a stranger He wore puffy wigs, schoolgirl glasses and tasteful printed dresses. There was a slightly prim stoicism about her, though he brightened every time he flashed her gap-toothed smile on the right side. She seemed like who she was: a Bed-Stuy daycare supervisor and a devout Christian.
But his personality didn’t end there. This church lady was a feisty one, of Guyanese and Bajan descent, and she spoke with impeccable propriety that had a touch of the island lilt heard in Sidney Poitier. She was right, all right, but it would have been a mistake to interpret that as quaint.
In “Shirley,” John Ridley’s sharp and lively domestic political docudrama, Regina King plays Shirley Chisholm with a quiet strength you can’t look away from. On the podium, Shirley speaks with elegant strength, and in private only a little less; In her decorous way, she lets it break. The film begins shortly after she is elected to Congress, and we see her approaching the Speaker of the House and asking for a different committee assignment, something a rookie representative simply doesn’t do. But Chisholm does. King gives him unwavering eye contact and a knowing tone, along with an unwavering sense of purpose, both fearless and headstrong.
“Shirley” then fast-forwards four years to the announcement of her presidential campaign. As the film reveals with clear fervor, the campaign was anything but quixotic. Did Chisholm believe she had a chance of winning? She was too smart not to know the odds. That she presented herself as if she really had a chance, never backing down, was part of the charm of her as an American. She was daring anyone to look at her and say “Why not?” As a presidential candidate, the Shirley Chisholm we see in “Shirley” promises to speak on behalf of the oppressed, workers and citizens of color, but her real message, which is far ahead of its time, is that politics has been snatched away. people. She wants him back. That mission begins with her rhetoric, which has a disarming directness that echoes the harsh, raucous slap of Malcolm X’s incendiary bravado.
Chisholm’s candidacy was not just an act of faith: it was about faith, an investment in the future of what those who felt excluded from the system, particularly African Americans, could and would achieve. She showed the way and she was right. At one point late in the campaign, she is introduced at a luncheon of black delegates at the Democratic Convention as “the only black woman crazy enough to run for president of these United States.” Chisholm’s campaign was actually the essence of sanity (she’s sensible and has the courage to oppose busing), but “Shirley” shows you that she had to be a little “crazy” to do it. Her determination is put against the wall. She crushes her husband, played by Michael Cherrie as a loyal spouse who is always there to support her but ends up disappearing into the woodwork. She rejects the role of marginal candidate. That’s her message: those who feel excluded from the system will only fight to get in when they stop thinking like outsiders.
Ridley, the veteran novelist, screenwriter and director, stages “Shirley” with the kind of fast-paced, entertaining aplomb one remembers from that solid series of HBO political docudramas (“Recount,” “Game Change”). This is not HBO; It’s Netflix. But it also fits perfectly on the small screen. Ridley, who wrote and directed it, doesn’t give in to the media’s nervous existential fireworks. He stages backroom meetings with a declarative punch that’s just shy of theatrical. The late Lance Reddick, in one of his last on-screen appearances, plays Wesley McDonald “Mac” Holder, Chisholm’s top adviser, and Reddick is wonderful, whether he’s pushing the campaign or trying to control Shirley. . Terrence Howard appears revealingly as Arthur Hardwick. Jr., the CFO trying to run a campaign with barely any funding. And Christina Jackson, as student volunteer Barbara Lee (who, following the path blazed by Chisholm, became the prominent congresswoman), makes her presence felt, as does Lucas Hedges, as youthful law student Robert Gottlieb, who demands to television networks for Chisholm’s right to appear in Democratic debates.
“Shirley” captures the moment that made Chisholm’s campaign possible. The counterculture was fading, but it had changed the world, something that was profoundly reflected in the presidential election of 1972. Chisholm was one of three black candidates who ran. And George McGovern was, in essence, the Democratic Party’s first (and last) counterculture candidate.
The Democrats were running against Richard Nixon and all of the president’s men, but Chisholm, and the film as well, treat McGovern as just another part of the aging white male establishment that she is trying to undermine and overthrow. Watching “Shirley,” you would never know that Chisholm and McGovern stood for so many of the same things. The film, in a rather over-the-top scene, shows more sympathy toward George Wallace (W. Earl Brown), whom Chisholm goes to visit in the hospital after being shot and paralyzed. That visit actually happened (the devout Chisholm believed in forgiveness…and repentance), but Ridley errs by arranging the meeting as if the two were old college buddies. He fares better in the scene where Shirley, at Diahann Carroll’s (Amirah Vann) house, asks Huey Newton (Brad James) to back the Black Panthers.
For most of the campaign, Chisholm is winning two or three percent of delegates. But as the convention approaches, with McGovern in the lead although not enough delegates to put him over the top, Chisholm tries to convince the black delegates not to sell his vote; several of the candidates promise the liberation of their black delegates. This was, at the time, a symbolic gesture, into which the film injects too much suspense. When the delegates and their leaders, such as Chisholm’s friend and colleague Rep. Ron Dellums (Dorian Crossmond Missick), turn around and endorse McGovern, Shirley treats it as a betrayal, although in reality she is betraying her own naivety about how tough politics is played. No, it is not “just”, it is not noble and it is not idealistic. Shirley Chisholm’s campaign was all three and that, as “Shirley” captures, made her not just a campaign but a beacon.