The Great Debaters

 (2007)

by Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

The Great Debaters is a fictionalized treatment of the superlative debate teams coached by Melvin Tolson at Wiley College in the 1930s. Wiley was a tiny all-black college in a small Texas town. Tolson was a charismatic English teacher who would later become a significant poet in his own right. He had been a debater in his own academic career, and from the time he came to Wiley as a teacher he undertook to organize a debate team. He was a driven man who drilled his students frequently and pushed them hard. Over the years his teams became perhaps the best in the entire nation. During one stretch they were undefeated for ten years.

The film's version of the story is a suitable homage to the triumphs of Tolson and his debaters, but is not historically accurate. Some of the characters are historical, while others are only composites based on real people. Some of the events happened more or less as pictured, while others have been conflated in order to consolidate approximately a decade into a single year, and still others never happened at all. Here's a rough guideline:

The groundbreaking debate with Oklahoma City University, which was the first mixed race debate in the South, did happen and it did feature the Wiley team's only female member, but it happened in 1930, four or five years before the events pictured in the film.

The film's climactic event, the big debate with Harvard, is fictional. Tolson's son and James Farmer Jr, a historical character who is also a major character in the film, have both declared that the creator of the myth must have confused it with some of the team's other successes.

"Benjamin Bell was a member of the 1936-39 team. He is also the unfortunate source of a recent widely-spread rumor - that Wiley College met and beat Harvard College, with Felix Frankfurter as one of the judges. The story first appeared, with Bell's attribution, in Sherman's American Legacy article. But there is no evidence that a debate with Harvard ever happened."

But the film's account of that debate is not entirely fictional. It's based closely on another incident, with Harvard's color plugged in to the letter jackets. The film's portrayal of the Harvard debate is a fairly accurate rendering of what actually happened when Wiley's team defeated the genuine national champions in 1935. Both teams appeared in tuxedos, and the debate was presented with great pomp and circumstance in a gigantic auditorium, in front of 2200 people. In fact, it happened quite a bit like the film's version of the debate. It just so happened that the 1935 national champion was USC, not Harvard, so the debate took place in California rather than Massachusetts and the topic was arms control, not civil disobedience. In the film's version of the story, the 14-year-old James Farmer was a freshman who took center stage that day. In the real debate against USC, Farmer was a 14-year-old freshman, but was an alternate on the team and was an observer that day.

The film represents the 1934-35 Wiley team as having consisted of a woman, the 14-year-old prodigy named James Farmer Jr. and a rebellious charismatic genius with a wild streak. They three of them are also involved in a bit of a romantic triangle. Only one of the characters (Farmer) is purely historical and, although the other two are based on historical figures, the three central historical characters never debated together. The only female member of the famed Wiley squads was named Henrietta Bell (Samantha Booke in the film), and she debated around 1930. The wild genius (named Henry Lowe in the film) was based quite closely on Henry Heights (High-Low, get it?), a brilliant man who was on Tolson's team on and off for more than four years because he kept getting expelled for drinking. Heights debated with Ms. Bell back in the early 30s (they were freshmen together) and was on the team with Farmer in the mid-30s, but the three of them never formed a single squad. The historical Heights was actually one of the tuxedoed students who defeated the 1935 national champions, but the fictional Lowe is pictured stepping aside so the young Farmer could have his moment in the sun. Ms. Bell was no longer on the team when they defeated USC. The other member of the Wiley team which defeated USC that day was named Hobart Jarrett, and he seems to have been cut from the script in the condensation process. Mr. Jarrett went on to become a professor of English at Brooklyn College.

As for the romantic triangle ... well, the woman and the wild man were on the team together for a while, and the young prodigy, though not yet a student at the university, might have been on campus during part of that period because his father taught there, so I suppose it is plausible to speculate that there were sparks between the older couple, and it is not out of the realm of possibility to speculate that the younger boy was jealous because of his own crush on the sophisticated older woman. Maybe some of that sexual tension really happened. Probably not.

My verdict on the fictionalization is that the script does represent the true spirit of the events which transpired during Tolson's reign, but one cannot count on the film's names, dates, and events for strict historical accuracy. Everything is true and nothing is true. It is not accurate by the standards of documentaries, but it is more than accurate enough by the standards of historical romances.

As the screenwriter declared:

"Although the Wiley team did defeat the national champions, we couldn't find documentary evidence that they actually debated Harvard University. Nonetheless, we felt for our story Harvard best embodied Wiley's incredible achievement and conveyed the real Wiley debate team's true sense of accomplishment. In that era, there was much as stake when a black college debated any white school, particularly one with the stature of Harvard. We used Harvard to demonstrate the heights they achieved."

Denzel Washington directed the film and also stars as Tolson. While university debating in America is basically a geek activity for intellectuals and policy wonks, Denzel did not target the movie at the intellectual or arthouse crowd. It's purely mainstream Hollywood. The actual debates have been reduced to stirring speeches suitable for the sound bite era. That's the very antithesis of what real debates consist of, and those emotional appeals and personal anecdotes are the very sorts of arguments which Tolson would have trained his team to avoid. These orators speak like preachers, not debaters, and they conveniently get to speak in favor of the issues they support emotionally. In real life, the black kids might have had to argue against allowing African-American students to enter public universities, and the white kids from Oklahoma City might have had to argue in favor of it, and both sides would have done just as thorough a job as if they had been on the opposite side. Since Tolson's teams almost never lost, they must have been brilliant at supporting arguments they opposed emotionally. Showing a bit of that might have made for quite a profound film, and the conflict between their words and their beliefs might even have made for intense drama and character development.

But The Great Debaters is not that movie. It is basically structured as a typical feel-good sports movie in which the noble underdogs rise up at the end to overcome the smug and highly favored national champions, as indicated by a stirring orchestral score. As it turns out, I like historical romances, I like Denzel Washington,  I like sports movies, and I was the captain of my own college debate team, so the movie was pretty much made just for me, just as Black Snake Moan was made especially for Tuna. Not surprisingly, I enjoyed it, despite its occasional lapses into Hollywood cliché. It is an inspirational presentation of accomplishments which deserve to be remembered. Wiley's teams really were as good as the film claims, and their achievements were not just a tribute to some individual efforts, but also spoke metaphorical volumes to the disbelieving white people of that era about the range of things black people could accomplish. Some of the film's lessons seem obvious to us now, but they were not obvious to the people of the thirties. It was truly a great accomplishment when a college with 500 black students in a rinky-dink Texas town defeated the national champions at a university activity of any kind, let alone one so cerebral as debate. That accomplishment deserves to be accompanied by a few violins.

I found one element of the film's stirring finale to ring false. The three debaters had originally been sent to Massachusetts by themselves because of Professor Tolson's legal problems. Somehow, through machinations never explained by the script, Tolson manages to get to Massachusetts just in time to rush to the debate and stand in the balcony so he can tearfully watch his students receive their trophy.

There was one other thing I found exceptionally irritating: the film gives us the formulaic "word slide" treatment at the end, and tells us what happened to the real characters like Tolson, Farmer and Farmer's father. No problem with those three, who are all important figures in American history. Young Farmer went on to found the Congress of Racial Equality, and Tolson became a world-renowned poet. But the word slides also tell us what happened to the fictional characters! Huh?

Well guess what? Here's the most important factual error. Nothing happened to them. They never existed. Listing their imaginary achievements only serves to diminish the genuine accomplishments listed beside them as if they were just additional leaps of imagination.

 

DVD INFO

* No information available as yet.

 

 

 

 

 

THE CRITICS AND ACADEMIES

It was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Picture, Drama .

3.5 James Berardinelli (of 4 stars)
4 Roger Ebert (of 4 stars)
74 Rotten Tomatoes  (% positive)
58 Metacritic.com (of 100)

THE PEOPLE

   
7.4 IMDB summary (of 10)
B+ Yahoo Movies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BOX OFFICE

Box Office Mojo. Opening Christmas Day, which is the same day this is written.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Miscellaneous

Here's the real story behind the Wiley debate teams. Interesting read.

This in-depth report may be the most thorough article I have ever read about a single movie - more than a dozen pages of info. If I left anything out, you should find it here.

Official site

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NUDITY REPORT

  • There is no nudity, The film is designed to be family-friendly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Google
 
Web www.scoopy.com

Our Grade:

If you are not familiar with our grading system, you need to read the explanation, because the grading is not linear. For example, by our definition, a C is solid and a C+ is a VERY good movie. There are very few Bs and As. Based on our descriptive system, this film is a:

C