Judas And The Black Messiah

“We have to understand very clearly that there’s a man in our community called a capitalist. Sometimes he’s black and sometimes he’s white. But that man has to be driven out of our community, because anybody who comes into the community to make profit off the people by exploiting them can be defined as a capitalist. And we don’t care how many programs they have, how long a dashiki they have. Because political power does not flow from the sleeve of a dashiki; political power flows from the barrel of a gun. It flows from the barrel of a gun!”

-Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party; From his speech “Power Anywhere Where There’s People” at Olivet Church, 1969.

In the aftermath of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s assassination, the Civil Rights movement found itself at a crossroads at the peak of a decade of counterculture movements.  The loss of Dr. King and Malcolm X gave way to the rise of the Black Panther Party.  Founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the BPP embraced open carry of firearms as a means of self-defense.  Consequently, J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen) saw the growing organization and their association with the Students for a Democratic Society—two former leaders of which were separately involved in the 1968 DNC Protests— as a looming, militant threat to the American way of life.

Directed by Shaka King and produced by Ryan Coogler (FRUITVALE STATION, BLACK PANTHER), JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH centers on the betrayal of Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) by fellow Panther William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield).  Following an arrest for impersonating an officer as part of an auto theft scam, O’Neal was recruited by an FBI agent (Jesse Plemons) into the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to infiltrate and drive apart the Black Panthers.

A frequent collaborator with Steve McQueen, Director of Photography Sean Bobbitt’s makes superb of negative space, whether black palettes highlighting brightly painted cars at night or the bronze tones of lounge lights reflecting off ebony skin, or a bone-white kitchen framing a heartbreaking dialogue between Fred and Betty Coachman (Amber Chardae Robinson), whose son had just been killed in a firefight with police.  Hampton’s vulnerabilities resurface in a tender moment with his fiancée, Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback), as she sits up in bed reciting poetry to him.

It’s utterly refreshing to see films like JUDAS, MOONLIGHT and ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI reveling in the beauty of blackness, punctuated by Mark Isham and Craig Harris’  portentous string hits.  As Hampton, Kaluuya captures the inflection and intensity of a born orator.  Stanfield conveys O’Neal’s paranoia in equal measure to the gaslighting manipulation of Plemons’ Agent Miller.  Each has a rationale that makes sense to himself, but Miller’s is backed by privilege and authority whereas O’Neal is, even in the bookended excerpts of a PBS interview (“Eyes on the Prize 2”, 15 January 1990), trying his damnedest to assure himself that what he did was right.