Biopic of pioneering heroine saved by King’s performance
Is two hours enough to dramatize even a part of any person’s real life?
The biopic form practically demands failure, or at least a series of narrative compromises made under pressure from so many factions: the real-life subject, or keepers of the now-deceased subject’s estate; the streamer or studio backing the project; and the filmmakers themselves, trying to do right by the person featured in the title, while finding a shape — and the ideal performer — to make the thing work.
“Shirley” constitutes the latest frustrating, two-hour example of all that pressure. You don’t, however, detect any of it in the carefully detailed performance by Regina King as Shirley Chisholm, the first Black congresswoman who campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972.
Watching King in scenes with the late, great Lance Reddick (as Chisholm adviser Wesley “Mac” Holder) or Terrence Howard (as Arthur Hardwick, her second husband) or André Holland (as Chisholm’s rival presidential hopeful Walter Fauntroy), you can relish the skill sets of these performers — their ease with even the horsiest loads of exposition. This, too, can scarcely be avoided in any biopic: those moments when two characters are meant to talk like they know each other well and are well-acquainted with the context of whatever they’re discussing. Problem is, the audience isn’t. So the dialogue starts sounding like they’re speaking directly to the viewer, in bullet points.
“Shirley” struggles with
many such moments. Writer-director John Ridley, who also produced, focuses the time he has on a few months in ’72, when Chisholm took on the political challenge of her life, seeking 1,500 delegates amid a pale male sea of skepticism. Richard Nixon was set to go for a second Republican term pre-Watergate; in those days, illegal presidential activity was enough for a vast majority of the party in power to ditch the man in charge.
Did Chisholm and her better-known, betterfunded competitors have a chance? No, and yes. Campaigns turn on a series of dimes. In America, we’re besotted with underdog stories because they typically involve longshots who end up winning. “Shirley” can’t work that way, although Chisholm proved an inspirational political figure.
I wish the movie dramatized those harried campaign months more persuasively. In a brief scene from Chisholm’s first congressional year, there’s a confrontation with a bigoted white Southern pol, fussed about this interloping Black woman from Brooklyn earning the same $42,500 annual salary he does. Does the scene work?
Only as crude shorthand. It feels more like a biopic straining for hit-and-run impact, rather than a telling fragment in a real story.
King’s in charge, of course. The top-billed Oscar winner (she won for “If Beale Street Could Talk”) works low-keyed wonders in selling what’s overstated in an understated, humanizing way. She evokes Chisholm’s public persona extremely well.
Ridley, who won his own Oscar for adapting “12 Years a Slave” has done solid work, like the recent Apple miniseries “Five Days at Memorial.” “Shirley” doesn’t quite hit the mark. This makes fluidity and interpersonal flow difficult. The political particulars of Chisholm’s presidential bid never risks much complication. Time is too short.
At one point, Chisholm resists the advisers’ pleas to simplify her “messaging” by saying: “I am not leaving out the nuance!” In “Shirley,” the top-shelf actors aren’t, either. Even if their material does.
MPA rating: PG-13 (for profanity including racial slurs, brief violence and some smoking) Running time: 1:57
How to watch: Netflix