Let me start with what’s inarguable. Denzel Washington is towering — not playing Malcolm X so much as being gradually replaced by him over three hours and twenty-two minutes. Spike Lee stages the Harlem ballroom sequences like a symphony conductor with a grudge. Ernest Dickerson’s photography belongs in a museum, and so do the costumes. A 202-minute biographical epic that moves like a thriller. This is, technically, the exact movie I always say I want.
“Craft: impeccable. Performance: all-time. And yet I found the film — and I want to use this term with precision — ‘too woke.’”
I will not be defining that term. I learned it recently, I like the way it sounds, and I’ve decided it applies here. My position is that a three-and-a-half-hour biography of Malcolm X should not have this much Malcolm X in it. The film has a point of view about its own subject, which I found forward. Norm has already seen this paragraph and is currently drafting something unkind, so let me just say: the thumb is down, my reasoning is airtight, and I’d ask that no one check on it.
Once, maybe twice a decade, I sit in a chair for three hours and twenty-two minutes and do not once check my watch. This is one of those. Denzel Washington gives what I consider the single greatest screen performance I have ever rated — the con-man swagger, the prison stillness, the Mecca transformation, three different men wearing one face — and I say this as a man whose thumb has load-bearing rust on it.
“In 1993 the Academy gave Best Actor to Al Pacino for shouting ‘hoo-ah’ at furniture. Denzel Washington had just spent 202 minutes BECOMING Malcolm X. I will die angry about this.”
Scent of a Woman is a fine film. It is also the beneficiary of the most flagrant robbery in Oscar history, and the Academy knew it — that’s why they handed Denzel the make-good statue nine years later for Training Day. Drama, history, a towering lead, a runtime that keeps its promise, and not one wizard: this movie was built in a lab for me. Thumb up. All the way up. And as for my colleague’s take — see below, where I will be conducting his review’s autopsy.