OVP: Marshall (2017)

Film: Marshall (2017)
Stars: Chadwick Boseman, Josh Gad, Kate Hudson, Dan Stevens, James Cromwell, Sterling K. Brown
Director: Reginald Hudlin
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"Stand Up for Something")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Biopics should never be confused with the men and women they depict.  Frequently this is something that I feel the need to underline, but especially when it comes to Thurgood Marshall, a hero to many (including me).  Marshall's career as a pioneering Civil Rights attorney and a lauded jurist (who eventually became the first black man on the Supreme Court), is riveting stuff & the sort of story that should work for a movie biopic, particularly if they continue the "slice of life" trend that biopics have done in recent years rather than try to cover decades of a person's existence.  However, Reginald Hudlin's recent treatment of Marshall, where we see him doing an early Civil Rights case about a black man accused of raping a white woman, is a cookie cutter biopic that in some stretches is just egregiously bad, poorly acted, and feels almost like a parody of an Oscar-bait film.

(Real Life Doesn't Have Spoiler Alerts) The film looks at Marshall (Boseman) in the 1940's, when he was an attorney for the NAACP that would travel the country trying to help people accused based on the color of their skin, rather than for crimes they actually committed.  He is brought to Connecticut to defend Joseph Spell (Brown) against accusations that he raped Eleanor Strubing (Hudson).  In order to be admitted to the courtroom to defend Spell, however, he needs a Connecticut attorney to vouch for him, and through a series of events this is Sam Friedman (Gad), who after a testy exchange with the judge (Cromwell), he's forced to defend Spell even though he's not a criminal attorney.

The film focuses almost exclusively on the case, rather than talk about other aspects of Marshall's life.  There are brief interludes with his wife, as well as a conversation with Langston Hughes (played by Jussie Smollett, whom I didn't know was in the film until I saw his name in the credits, but it felt right to watch some of his work in light of what happened yesterday), but mostly it's just focused on the case, and in particular underlining the racial prejudice against Spell, whom you don't have to be a rocket scientist as an audience member to know is not guilty.  The film plays out as one would expect, with Gad's Friedman initially reluctant to get involved in a case of this nature & ending up being a noted Civil Rights attorney after he gets Spell off.

This is all a feel-good history lesson, and occasionally we need those in a world that is blinded by racism & hate (thanks in large part to a White House who uses that as their point-in-trade), but it's also a dreadful movie.  The film feels like a cookie-cutter story, one that would be more at-home as a made-for-TV film from the 1980's than a major-budget motion picture.  The acting is stiff & dreadful.  I don't know that I've seen Hudson more ill-at-ease in her character, and Gad is horrendous, at one point not even able to pull off a convincing onscreen laugh without it looking staged.  Boseman is the best part of it, though he frequently feels too, well, sexy for the part, but at least he has some charisma to spare as Marshall, though his big moments feel ham-fisted.  However the script is rife with cliche, and there's no sense of art in what's happening onscreen.  The main title song is very hummable; Andra Day is too good of a singer not to command the (weirdly, considering how cardboard the rest of the film is) creative end credits, but this song isn't worthy of this movie, which is boring & unworthy of its protagonist.