Though Hollywood had a baffling tendency to ignore African-American viewers and African-American actors for much of the rest of the year, February and Black History Month tend to bring a respectful, though not transcendent, movie or two about great African-Americans, most of them men, from the past.
This year’s great man is the Olympian Jesse Owens, who humiliated the Nazis in Berlin in 1936, and the movie is Stephen Hopkins’ “Race,” which stars Stephan James as the runner who was once the fastest man alive.
“Race” is at its most interesting when it’s making a mockery of American Olympic head Avery Brundage’s (Jeremy Irons) contention that there’s a difference between politics and sport. In fact, Hopkins and writers Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse argue, sports are political on almost every level, from college training facilities to the Olympic stadiums where dictatorial regimes advertise themselves to the world.
On the Ohio State campus, Jesse Owens arrives on campus and finds himself in the midst of a conflict between the football and track teams. When one administrator complains to track coach Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis) that Snyder is running a Model T team, where the athletes are “any color you want so long as it’s black,” Snyder shoots back that “Maybe if you and Coach Schmidt let them play football, they wouldn’t all choose track and field.”
The football team’s bigotry is the source of the track team’s triumph. In a later scene, Snyder takes pleasure in tweaking the football players who toss racist insults at his runners, delaying their access to the locker room and calling them “gorillas” to show the track team that while the football squad can dish it out, they can’t take it themselves.
Later, when Larry finds out that Jesse has been missing practices because he is working shifts at a service station to support his girlfriend, daughter and unemployed parents, Larry gets Jesse a $60-a-month no-show job as an Ohio State Senate page. In the context of the movie, Larry’s generosity saves Jesse from the pressures of extreme poverty, giving him the freedom to train. But it’s also a foreshadowing of the systems that have sprung up at schools with elite sports teams to free college athletes not just from the burdens of outside jobs, but from any responsibility to pursue the educational part of college.
As the Olympics approach, “Race” explores how questions of anti-black racism and anti-Semitism are tangled up together.
As the American Olympic committee debates whether or not to participate in the games, one member raises the exclusion of Jewish athletes from the German teams. “Maybe the rest weren’t good enough,” one member ventures, raising an excuse that has a long history of being used to excuse discrimination.
On a visit to Berlin, Brundage, who hopes to avert an American boycott of the 1936 games, demands that Joseph Goebbels (Barnaby Metschurat) put a stop to the harsh treatment of German Jews. “They respectfully request that we sanitize our racial edicts,” as a translator puts it. Goebbels complies to a limited extent, and the Americans ultimately vote to come.
At first, it seems like things will go well. American Jewish athletes flash their Star of David necklaces at German guards, and everyone settles in at the dorms.
But when Jesse wins three gold medals, Goebbels blackmails Brundage, whose company is building Germany’s new embassy in Washington, into scratching Jewish relay runners from the games. Jesse is tapped to replace one of them, but insists he won’t run unless the Jewish athletes agree; it’s a nice little moment of solidarity in a situation where white athletics officials hoped to play black and Jewish runners off against each other.
“Race” also parses the power and limits of black excellence.
At an early Big Ten championship, Larry is outraged when timekeepers deny Jesse his first world record in the hundred meters, adding a tenth of a second on to his time so he only equals rather than surpasses a white record holder. But over the course of that day, Jesse’s sheer talent wins a racist crowd over. By the time he’s called his shot in the broad jump and set another, now undeniable, world record in a hurdles event, the crowd is cheering his name.
For all Jesse’s skills to convert white fans, though, and for all he shows up Goebbels in Berlin, his abilities serve to separate Jesse from other black people in the eyes of white observers, rather than making a broad argument that all black people deserve respect. And even then, the liberation Jesse wins for himself has its limits.
When Harry Davis (Glynn Turman), an Ohio state representative, asks Jesse not to participate in the Berlin games on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Jesse tells him what he loves about running.
“Out there on that track, you’re free of all this,” Jesse explains. “There ain’t not black and white, there’s only fast and slow. For those 10 seconds, you’re free.”
However remarkable that transformation might be, it’s a brief one, limited to a few seconds on a carefully-manicured oval. The world returns when the race is over. And personal victories don’t sap virulent systems of all their power.
An intelligent script can’t make “Race” other than what it is, which is a handsome, dutiful, slightly predictable historical film. But the smartest parts of the movie are worth heeding.
Toward the end of the film, German broad jumper Carl Long (David Kross) explains why he helped Jesse avoid fouling out of the event during trials, and why he encouraged Jesse to take his last jump even after it was clear Jesse had won the gold. “I wanted your best. Otherwise, what is the point?” Carl tells Jesse.
It’s a question that resonates far beyond the Berlin Olympic stadium, and far beyond 1936.
