Shirley

dir: John Ridley

2024

There was already a film a few years ago called Shirley.

That was about a different Shirley. In that flick, an absolute queen called Elizabeth Moss played legendary miserable author Shirley Jackson, in a complicated biopic with manipulative twists and turns.

This Shirley is played by an absolute queen of the movie screen, being Regina King, playing a pretty interesting woman who strove for political power, called Shirley Chisholm, in a simplistic biopic with no twists and a couple of turns.

It’s a very strong performance, and yet it’s a flick that suffers from a collective desire to avoid some level of embarrassment.

Here’s what I mean: A few years ago, there was a mini-series called Mrs America. It starred Cate Blanchett as I guess the main character, being the both venomous and poisonous Phyllis Schlafly, which focussed on her opposition to the Equal Rights Act that they tried to pass in the States in the 70s. In the series there’s a whole rogues gallery of great actresses playing a collection of famous feminists like Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Uzo Aduba played Shirley Chisholm.

I’d heard of most of the women that were represented in the show, and was glad to learn about impressive people I didn’t know anything about. But when there was an episode devoted to Shirley, and the fact she tried to run as the Democratic candidate for President in the 1970s, I was like “how the fuck did I not know about this? Seems like someone should have mentioned it in the vast raft of American material I’ve consumed over the last 40 years or so.”

Maybe I had heard or read about it, and maybe I didn’t take any notice. That’s shameful, isn’t it? The first African-American woman to win a seat in Congress in the 1960s, and who wanted to run for President against Nixon in 1972? Apart from the fact that she should have won (I’m not saying she could have, I’m just saying if we lived in the just universe that the religious claim to believe in, it would have happened), how is that not a story better known?

Again, to go back to something else (that isn’t this flick), that miniseries I was talking about previously was about a lot of things, but one of its key components was the fact that second wave feminism in the 1970s was very much focussed on fighting for the rights of predominately middle class white women, at least in the States. There wasn’t a whole lot of intersectionality going on, and in dreadful fashion it showed how a bunch of feminist pioneers or vanguards happily sold out Shirley in order to keep a seat at the table for themselves.

Part of the focus of this film in contrast to that aspect is the whole raft of prominent African-American political powerbrokers and activists who were otherwise happy to throw Shirley under the bus if it meant they got to maintain some kind of power in theoretical administrations that the eventual Democratic nominee would grant them.

Even if you know little about the history of the last century, you know the name Nixon. It’s practically a brand in itself, like Hugo Boss, or Coca Cola or the Ku Klux Klan. Nixon. It’s just that name.

Everyone knows he was a president. Most people know he won two terms. Some people remember that his win in 1972 was a landslide. A Landslide. Not everyone remembers who he faced. It was Senator George McGovern. Not Shirley, sadly.

So, on its face, this flick is about the African-American woman who ran and lost the nomination for president, in an election which would see Nixon win in the biggest landslide in American history.

That’s…not…it’s a bit of a reach to make something so profoundly unsuccessful sound interesting.

It helps that Regina King wanted to tell the story. She does a remarkable job achieving Shirley’s voice and conviction; a very determined and certain delivery, along with that Barbadian accent. The force of a school teacher along with the storytelling, rise and fall intonations of a Methodist preacher, it makes for a powerful package. You can see how she convinces / bulldozes so many people into coming around to her way of thinking. She accepts no obstacles, she does not allow for “that’s just the way it is” kinds of statements. She fights for something she wants until other people relent, or get out of the way.

It’s convincing, at least to me. She confronts and tries to convince the various sexist men around her who pay lip service to the idea of women’s equality and African-American equality under the law and in the political process, but she tries to convince rather than conquer. It’s a difficult balancing act to still be entertaining.

At no stage does the character seem to acknowledge the impossibility of what she’s trying to do. Everything looks impossible until it happens. I’m sure after what Shirley went through, the idea of an African-American president, and a woman no less, seemed even more remote, probably even up to the 2000s. I have no doubt there were people around Obama saying the same stuff back in the day.

To those that tell her that something isn’t feasible, or likely, or going to work, she says, kinda to us, why not? Why couldn’t a woman expect equal treatment under the law, via the media or through the so called democratic processes of the Democratic Party in order to run as a candidate? There are never solid reasons beyond the machinations and the prejudices of even people who think of themselves as allies. If there is no good answer to “why not?”, then it means the process itself is neither fair nor representative.

When a rival Dixiecrat governor, being the vile segregationist and professional racist George McGovern gets shot (by someone even more racist than him), Shirley chooses to visit him in hospital, over all the objections of all her advisers and staff. No-one thinks the reality of it, or the optics of it, could possibly do Shirley any favours. And yet she does it anyway.

Does she do it as an aspect of political manoeuvring, does she do it to somehow further the civil rights cause by offering an olive branch to an enemy who doesn’t see African-Americans as human, is she doing it solely out of Christian charity? Who knows, but she does it anyway.

When she’s told not to court the endorsement of the Black Panthers through Huey Newton, the same people who were telling her visiting Wallace would alienate her base, tell her Newton’s endorsement will alienate her base. Are they wrong? Who knows, but she does it anyway.

I am sure you’re sensing a pattern anyway. Nevertheless, she persisted. A flick like this can only coast so far solely on the central performance, thus it needs some other compelling personalities and performances to bounce off of. Central, for me, is her adviser Mac, played by the wonderful and sorely missed Lance Reddick, who must have filmed this just before he died. He’s been dead a year already, and he’s still popping up like the legend that he is. I hope he keeps popping up forever.

He can’t believe Shirley’s stubbornness sometimes, but he’s not coming (at least) from the sexist position at all that she’s overstepping her limitations and should stay in her lane or some shit like that. He just, eventually, gets exasperated over the fact that he’s one of her advisors, and yet she generally ignores everyone’s advice, including his.

I’m not going to talk about Shirley’s first husband, who plays a prominent part in this, who has his moments of expressing just how emasculating he finds her political aspirations. I will talk about the guy who plays a character here, who would go on to be her second husband.

As we learnt from the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, which has set the template forever more for every biopic, first wives ain’t shit. First wives drag you down, don’t believe in you, keep telling you you’re going to fail, keep popping out babies at random, and then leave you at your (first) lowest point, before your greatest success.

So it goes with First Husbands too, I guess.

Second Husband? He’s smooth, handsome as fuck and will support you for the rest of his life. And he’ll be played by Terrance Howard *swoon*.

Isn’t it great that we get second chances?

The only other chap I want to single out is the great Lucas Hodges who sports a diabolical haircut and plays Shirley’s token white friend / employee Robert Gottlieb. Despite being barely out of his teens and not even having completed his law degree, Robert achieves an almost impossible feat by taking on the FCC and the television channels in order to protest the unfairness of excluding Shirley from the screened debates leading up to the convention. It’s that small victory that gives them hope to sustain them a little bit longer.

Not achieving what you set out to do is not the same thing as failing. It’s a failure to not even try, or to fail to question the circumstances and the assumptions that govern people’s lives, personally or otherwise, that make up the political machinery of society. This flick makes the strong case that its point isn’t that Shirley didn’t get to be president. It’s that she chose to run for president. And the people who might mock her for her ambitions or who point out all the reasons why American society wasn’t ready for her are the same kinds of voices who thought they got the vote too soon or they were released from bondage too soon back after that war in 1865. Those voices don’t want or accept change, they just want to keep people exactly where they are.

And that’s why trailblazers, for that very reason, have to be able to see something beyond what the rest of us see, because even when we’re not ready for change, they know it’s time.

7 times Shirley deserves a massive statue of herself kicking down the Washington Monument in her high heels out of 10

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“I have seen too much suffering, and I don’t know how to not try” – you have my vote - Shirley