“One Night in Miami” is a poetic, hypothetical reimagining of an evening with four of the most influential Black men in America at a specific time – Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali (Eli Goree), Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge). Director Regina King and writer Kemp Powers set the table for these men to challenge one another about how they want to be remembered in the flux of the civil rights movement and cultural shifts happening in the 1960s.
If you’re a fan of Michael Mann’s “Ali” you’ll most certainly remember the fleeting moment in the wake of the shocking World Title victory over Sonny Liston. Cassius Clay ditches a celebration with a majority white business group for the modest hotel room of spiritual brother Malcolm X with crossover sporting/movies legend Jim Brown and Sam Cooke. Kemp Powers – who adapted his play for the screenplay – takes this documented gathering and embellishes.
At the beginning of “One Night in Miami,” King and Powers have the foresight to both embrace and immediately subvert your expectations of each man arriving at this hypothetical meeting of minds. To satiate you, you get the caricature; it’s a tactic to comfort the persona that you curate in your mind. Before you know it though, you’re seeing frustrations, unfortunate knockdowns, colossal bombings on stage, the hostility within the Nation of Islam and the tensions of using one’s platform to be bigger than just a single “thing.”
Oscar-winning actor King has transitioned beautifully to the director’s chair, extracting deliberate and empathetic turns from four terrific young actors burdened with the task of finding the doubts, fears, confessional moments for each of their icons.
Eli Goree’s performance as Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali shows that he’s not fully flexed into the persona that eventually defines his career in many ways. There’s a tendency to feel as if Muhammad Ali was the fully formed, political icon that we remember out of the gate. It’s refreshing to see King, Powers, and Goree emphasise his youth with these peers and let them let insecurity crack through the persona he was building.
Aldis Hodge’s Jim Brown is a strange calming force in the film. If you’re the biggest record breaking-star in the NFL with Hollywood knocking at your door – one would imagine that he’d be rocking that same kind of swagger usually associated with Ali. Hodge plays Brown with patience that’s intimidating. He is not one to be rash in his approach, and his quiet but resonant power affords him the respect to ask the most challenging questions of his friends without hostility.
From the frustration that he lets out to his manager in the wake of a poor showing at the Copacabana, quiet moments with his lady and finally confrontations about how he chooses to deploy his influence; Leslie Odom Jr’s Sam Cooke is a time bomb. Odom Jr’s performance requires him to sing like Sam Cooke. Rather than the frustrating Oscar garnering lip-sync, Odom Jr. belts out several numbers as Cooke. Odom Jr. delivers with an insanely high degree of difficulty in both the high register and the resonant buttery soul of Cooke’s pipes.
To step into the shoes of Malcolm X is significant for an actor. Denzel Washington and Spike Lee created a definitive take in the eponymous biopic, while Mario Van Peebles offered an unforgettable potent guest turn in “Ali”. Kingsley Ben-Adi’s Malcolm has a youthful exuberance that reframes the man’s age at this particular moment. It’s so strange that the incalculable weight of movements landed squarely on the shoulders of men like X, and Martin Luther King Jr. at a young age, and they didn’t buckle. Their resilience, defiance and willingness to sacrifice their lives for the cause was cauterised early.
King’s subtle formal touch breaks through as she embraces the main motel room space’s modest decor by using different furniture items in the frame as their symmetrical hinge points. There’s a phenomenal exchange between Hodge’s Jim Brown and Ben-Adir’s Malcolm X where the angular crystal of an ashtray becomes the pivot point of the scene.
They begin framed together at the beginning of the discussion one way before, swinging the other way. The tactile recreation of that 60s modest, hotel decor functions to echo the clarity and openness that it wants for these characters. King deploys for maximum emotional impact. The finale positions Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” (know reframed to be inspired by this imagined evening) performed on “The Tonight Show” as the film’s compelling closing montage.
“One Night in Miami” does something magical in the end. After presenting each of these characters’ plight, after exposing their flaws and fears, after showing their vulnerability, they don’t even slightly diminish. In fact, as the movie races toward its conclusion, our most profound regret is that King and Powers only tinkered with one night.
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January 18, 2021 at 03:47PM
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Review: "One Night In Miami" - Dark Horizons
"Review" - Google News
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