Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, May 5, 1995 TAG: 9505050057
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Recently, Oliver Stone filled the screen with groundless accusations in "JFK," and the formerly prestigious Merchant and Ivory team perpetrated a boring bit of unfounded revisionism with "Jefferson in Paris." Now writer-producer Melvin and director-producer Mario Van Peebles put their own spin on history with "Panther."
The result is obvious propaganda that falls short both as history and as entertainment. But with the recent bombing in Oklahoma City and the debate it has rekindled over firearms and citizens' reactions to government "oppression," the film's political themes are disturbingly relevant.
First, some background. Melvin Van Peebles' association with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (its official name) goes back to the late 1960s when he made his independent cult hit "Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song." That liberation fantasy struck a chord with the party's founders. It was also his young son Mario's screen acting debut. As an adult, Mario has directed "New Jack City" and "Posse." The two appeared together in the video comedy, "Identity Crisis."
Not surprisingly then, their collaboration portrays the Panther leadership as idealistic and blameless Marxist revolutionaries. Bobby Seale (Courtney B. Vance) and Huey Newton (Marcus Chong) simply exercise their constitutional right to bear arms against the Oakland, Calif., police department, which they see as an occupying army. (Essentially the same views have been expressed against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms by G. Gordon Liddy on his radio show.)
In 1967, one of their first recruits is Judge (Kadeem Hardison), a Vietnam vet. He's also signed up by police detective Brimmer (Joe Don Baker) as an informer, and by Huey as a double agent against the cops. At the same time, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Richard Dysart) declares the Panthers a threat to national security and launches the COINTELPRO operation against them. Brief passages from actual COINTELPRO documents are used to punctuate the film.
Judge and Brimmer are fictional characters. The rest are real, though they don't emerge as believable. And that's the central problem with "Panther." The film never gets beneath the loud rhetoric of the times to reveal characters the audience can sympathize and identify with. To a degree, that approach is historically defensible - individualism wasn't highly valued in the '60s - but filmgoers need something more than slogans.
The screenplay also attempts to cover several busy years filled with a large cast of characters. Some key events, including arrests and escapes of key players, are sketched in with voice-over narration. Even the Panthers' most famous moment - their armed entry into the California State Assembly - is cut short on screen.
Also, the Van Peebles choose largely to ignore the social and political upheaval that was going on all over America at the same time. Their conclusion is based on conspiratorial speculation that's totally out of key with the rest of the story, and it all ends with a conventional (and poorly staged) Hollywood shootout.
Several of the people whose life and work are depicted here have objected strongly to historical inaccuracies. The Van Peebles have answered that their film is not meant to be a documentary, but a "dramatization."
Fair enough. But "Panther" is a simplistic and uninformed dramatization - not so much a movie as a two-hour bumper sticker.
Panther **
A Warner Bros. release playing at Valley View Mall 6. 120 min. Rated R for exceptionally strong language, violence.
by CNB