Judas and the Black Messiah 2021

[8.3/10] I took the title of Judas and the Black Messiah to be fanciful, something eye-catching and poetic that represents some of the larger themes of the film in a more lyrical way. But it’s more literal than I had imagined.

Fred Hampton, the charismatic and forward-thinking chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther party, is painted as nothing short of a messianic figure. He is preternaturally kind and decent. Despite his revolutionary fervor, he shows mercy and relents from violence. He speaks of the inequities of the system, the injustice inherent in it. He casts off divisions in the name of recognizing common grievances and collective solutions. He is, in short, too good for this world, a beacon of light where it’s needed most.

And William O’Neal is nothing short of his betrayer. Rising through the ranks of the Black Panthers to become the Illinois chapter’s security captain, while informing to the FBI in exchange for his pieces of silver, O’Neal is the film’s passenger protagonist but also its villain. It makes him human, struggling with self-doubt and regret, but also venal, willing to set aside his principles and sell out his friends and the movement, to protect his own hide and feather his own nest. He dines at Fred Hampton’s last supper, having laid the ground for what happens next.

The FBI, then, are the Romans in the story, the ruling body afraid of what this humble but powerful man preaches, and so conspires to kill him, lest his ideas and influence spread. There is no nuance to the feds in Judas. They are an evil collective, laughing at the pamphlets they write to sow discord, seeming plainly undisturbed at their informants committing terrible acts, and casually plot to take down those agitating for liberation in cold blood.

The film zeroes in on the irony of Special Agent Mitchell’s protestations to O’Neal -- that the Black Panthers and the Klu Klux Klan are two sides of the same coin, equally brutal in their methods and both solely interested in fostering hate and destabilizing the country. It is, instead, the cruelty of the organization he works for that’s put on display, the despicable methods that mark the movie’s vision of the FBI as the cause of the anger and barbarism they claim to be trying to fight.

That’s the one place of nuance Judas offers. Initially, Agent Mitchell (played with a banal, homespun malevolence by Jesse Plemons) seems like the decent guy, the sop to audiences who will recognize the rot in his organization’s bunker. Instead, his arc is the reverse, to seem empathetic and on the side of right in the beginning, but to ultimately reveal himself as no less cruel or prejudiced or capable of committing atrocities when racial equality is not presented as an abstraction, but as something that could affect his family. Not for nothing, there’s a good piece to be written about the difference between this approach and the one taken by fellow Oscar contender The Trial of the Chicago 7 toward a similarly-positioned character.

With that backdrop, the movie succeeds both on the framing and on the strength of its performances. Daniel Kaluuya cuts an impressive figure as Hampton, able to turn on those moment of power where his words and presence need to stir the soul, while also being able to tone down the man in softer times to show his sense of being a philosopher, a harmonizer, someone who defuses situations when needed instead of igniting them. But he also embodies Hampton away from his revolutionary fervor, in moving personal moments where he canoodles with his wife or exudes camaraderie with his brothers-in-arms, as friends, not just compatriots in the same struggles.

At the same time, Lakeith Stanfield is a live wire as O’Neal. He carries the internal buzz of a man who’s believing the messages he hears expressed so thunderingly from the man he’s been sent to spy on, while also being desperately afraid that he’ll be found out and punished for his betrayal, in vicious terms. He’s not a one note scoundrel, but rather the opposite of Fred, someone who cares more about saving himself than about saving the people.

That’s the core of Hampton’s nigh-divine decency here, and the film’s secondary theme -- that where there are people, there is power, and that protecting them, educating them, empowering them, is more important than preserving any one life, even his.

We see it in Fred’s rejection of the money meant to grant him escape from an impending prison sentence on trumped on charges, earmarking instead to build a clinic to honor the memory of his dead comrade and trumpet what he stood for. We see it in the way that what really makes the FBI nervous is how Hampton unites different factions and groups under a common cause of the oppressed, one that cuts across race. And we see it, most movingly, in the way that the bombing of the Panthers’ headquarters by the police is met with an outpour of support and help from across the community, a sign that what starts with the people cannot be stopped or suppressed even by the most incendiary rebukes from those in power.

These moments of hope come with a certain dreadful dramatic irony to anyone who walks into the movie knowing where Fred Hampton’s story ends. It makes the scenes where O’Neal comes so close to being found out that much more harrowing, knowing that it could have prevented this fate. It makes the poem from Deborah Johnson, Hampton’s partner and the mother of his child, all the more poignant when she voices the sentiment of the costs extracted of this war, and considers the different kinds of revolutionary acts further away from such mortal peril. And it makes Fred’s last night something mournful and almost holy, the last words, the last bond, of a prophetic figure before his fated end.

In that, Judas and the Black Messiah presents something spiritual, biblical in its atmosphere and the lens through which it views these grisly events. There are the brutal overlords, heedlessly cutting down those who would challenge their established order. There is the self-preserving turncoat, pained by his actions but unwilling or unable to make a different choice. And there is the man himself, near-deified in death, speaking his truth and imparting his message to the people, in the hopes both would outlive him, and the knowledge that they would almost certainly have to.