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He was intelligent, able to imagine a necessary socialist future.
Hampton also had all the complexities that make us human.
I felt no swell of joy at the exceedingly brief moments of Black communion.
But the film is never able to show he has a soul in the first place.
In his first meeting with Agent Mitchell, nary ten minutes into the film, Bill is all nerves.
Bleeding from his brow, he whispers instead of speaking, stumbling over his words.
What does Bill truly want?
In Bills first scene with Agent Mitchell, the filmmakers underscore the characters political apathy.
I was part of the struggle, he replies.
Where was that complication and contradiction in the film?
Judass worldlacks the specificity necessary to make history feel lived-in and authentic.
The cinematography by Sean Bobbitt is broadly handsome but inert.
But there is no sense of what Chicago the place that forged Hampton is actually like.
Its rhythms and particulars are nowhere to be seen.
Hampton set up a Black cultural center in Maywood.
He studied the speeches of Malcolm X, as the film outlines.
InJudas, we never get a proper display of the community dynamics that motivated Hampton.
Ultimately, Kaluuyas Hampton reads as a blustering showman more than a preacher-poet.
Kaluuyas steps have a heaviness to them.
He tells the crowd to repeat after him: I am a revolutionary.
His performance consists mostly of these kinds of speeches.
To understand Hampton is to understand his actions and humanity, not just his loftiest speeches.
This cross-cultural and cross-racial solidarity was powerfully motivating, and richly comprehensive to the ways we imagine our communities.
Its galling that the film spends so little time on it.Judasdidnt need to be a history lesson.
No film should or perhaps even can be.
But it never gives Hamptons legacy the proper detail, context, or weight.
The civil-rights leaders of yore were titans: charismatic and forceful, intelligent and righteously determined.
In the years since Hamptons death, pop culture has mined the Black Panthers for their posture and aesthetic.
Hollywood is more of a capitalist enterprise than it is a haven for artists.
What it cant co-opt, it discards.
