Black Lives Movies: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Do The Right Thing, The Hate U Give and Just Mercy

In light of the recent conversations that we're having nationwide (or should be having), I decided to rewatch four different films that deal with either racism or our criminal justice system. All of them take different angles. I know it's difficult for me as a white man to analyze these pieces of art that might resonate differently with black audiences, but I'm going to make my attempt because I want to encourage people to watch these movies. I believe that films have the power to change hearts and minds. I strongly believe that black lives do matter and I hope the exploration of these topics will help advance that cause.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)

I started off with a classic movie available to watch for free with an Amazon Prime membership. This 1967 movie was considered risky to make at the time. There weren’t many positive on-screen depictions of interracial marriage at the time. In fact, interracial marriage was still illegal in 17 states when this movie came out and the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia (immortalized in a recent film “Loving”) had not yet struck down such practices nationwide. The movie studio wondered whether white audiences would flock to see this movie. It was a box office smash and it was nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture. It lost to “In the Heat of the Night,” another film dealing with race and also starring actor Sidney Poitier.

The movie now feels dated to today’s younger audiences. The premise is that a young white woman surprises her family by bringing home a black man that she met on vacation and they plan to get married right away. He wants their blessing and they have only that night to decide how they feel.

The parents, played by real-life couple Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, are taken aback. Some of it is reasonable because, let’s face, whether white or black most families might feel weird if their daughter brought home someone they never met (and that she’s only known for a few days) and they say they’re going to get married immediately. Most people might say, “Can we get to know the guy for a little while? What’s the rush?” While that point is brought up a few times in the movie, it’s glossed over in favor of a movie narrative based on a quick timeline. A longer movie that took the place over the span of months would just not have worked.

One other flaw to the narrative is the fact that Poitier’s character is pretty much perfect. Besides his impulsiveness to marry right away, there’s really not much anyone could say about him. He’s a successful young doctor who is widely respected and uses his time to help the less fortunate. He’s respectful and loving toward their daughter. The conflict becomes a little too clean when they make his character a little too perfect.

The interesting aspect to this movie is that Tracy and Hepburn aren’t KKK-level racists. They are progressive intellectuals who teach their daughter the importance of civil rights and the wrongs of racism. Tracy’s character says he has no problem with his daughter marrying a black man but he worries about the troubles they face from others who are ignorant and he doesn’t want to see them have a tough life. In the end, he decides their love is more important than any struggles they face.

Younger audiences might think this movie is dated because interracial marriage isn’t a big deal nowadays but you have to view this movie through the lens of the time period that it came out in.

I think even today’s audiences can get something from this movie. Not only is the acting superb but it’s important to realize how far we have come in terms of race relations and how that painful past can still affect people to this day.

Do the Right Thing (1989)

This one includes major spoilers, but it’s really difficult to analyze this one without discussing the major plot points.

This is probably writer/director Spike Lee’s best movie. It’s the story of one day in a New York Bed-Stuy neighborhood on the hottest day of the year. It was filmed on location on real streets that were repainted with red and orange colors in order to help the viewers feel the heat. The plot centers around a pizzeria owned by an Italian-American family led by Sal, played by Danny Aiello, who scored a Best Supporting Actor nomination. Originally Spike Lee wanted Robert DeNiro in the role but he turned it down. Sal isn’t what you’d call progressive. He yells that rap music is garbage and in a fit of anger he uses the N-word. But he’s not completely racist. He has a little crush on a young black woman who comes into his shop. He gets annoyed with his black delivery boy Mookie, played by Spike Lee himself, but he still treats him like a son in a way. He tells him that he will always have a place at his business as long as he wants it. When Sal’s son, played by John Turturro, says he is tired of serving and working with black people, his father tells him that he’s wrong. He said he takes pride in serving this neighborhood and that they grew up on his food. Sal begins to butt heads with a political revolutionary named Buggin’ Out who has directed his ire at the fact that Sal has pictures of famous Italian-Americans up on his wall but no black people. He goes around the neighborhood trying to lead a boycott but his black neighbors laugh him off. They don’t care. He teams up with Radio Raheem, a boombox-blasting neighborhood fixture who listens to Public Enemy all day long. Raheem is upset that Sal told him to turn off his music. For each of them, their anger isn’t really about photographs on a wall or music. It’s about something else. And the terrible heat isn’t helping the situation.

Raheem and Sal clash and he calls him a guinea and he calls him the N-word. Sal breaks Raheem’s radio with a baseball bat and then Raheem attacks Sal. When the police respond, they put Raheem into a chokehold and Raheem ends up dead. After Raheem’s death, Mookie throws a trash can through Sal’s window and riots ensue. The business is destroyed.

In the aftermath, older black residents say it’s a shame that they burned down their own neighborhood while others are more focused on Raheem’s death. When Mookie shows up the next day to Sal to just ask him for the money he’s owed, with no apology or sympathy for his business being destroyed, Sal feels betrayed. They exchange tense words and they somewhat reconcile but not fully.

The movie ends with two very long quotes from both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, which differing views on the use of violence. The movie doesn’t take a stance. It leads it up to you.

What’s great about this movie is it really leaves it up to the viewer to decide, “Did they do the right thing?” No character in this movie is 100 percent right and no character is 100 percent wrong. Like the real world, there are nuances and shades of gray. A cartoonish super-racist character would have done nothing to lead to real conversation.

The most important thing to take from this movie is how these things get started and things can escalate. The burning heat outdoors is almost a metaphor for society. When the temperature keeps rising, bad things happen.

The Hate U Give (2018)

Back in 2018, the Indiana Film Journalists Association named this film their top movie of the year. And while I probably would not have even put it in my top 10 that year, it’s still an underrated gem that many people should see. It’s based on a young adult novel that deals and stars Amandla Steinberg, probably most famous for playing Rue in “The Hunger Games.” It tells the story of a young black girl named Starr Carter who lives in a predominately black neighborhood but goes to a nearly all-white private school (Catholic school girl skirt and all). She’s torn between these two words and finds herself being a different person around her white friends and her black friends. On one fateful night she’s riding in a car with a black friend from her childhood named Khalil and the police pull them over for some unknown reason. Starr has had “the talk” with her dad about how to handle herself in police situations but Khalil doesn’t listen to her. He ignores the officers commands and when he reaches in his car for a hairbrush, the officer mistakes it for a gun and he’s shot and killed. From there, Starr’s life is turned upside down. The police have questions about Khalil’s gang connections and that seems to become the media narrative, even though it had nothing to do with the shooting. Starr’s white friends are now suspicious of her since she was in the car with a suspected gang member and the leader of the gang is worried she’ll talk to police. One of the most poignant scenes comes from the rapper-turned-actor Common, who plays Starr’s uncle who is a cop. As a black man, he understands racism but he also knows police procedures. He said he sees it as a traffic stop gone wrong, saying, “A lot goes through a cop’s mind when they pull someone over… the officer thinks, are they hiding something? Is the car stolen? If there’s a girl in the passenger seat like you, does she look alright? Has she been beaten or raped? If they talk to each other, they might be trying to hide something or distract. What are they hiding in the car? …. If they reach for the door or put their hand through an open window, they’re probably reaching for a weapon. So if I think I see a gun, I don’t hesitate, I shoot.”

Starr responds, “You shoot? Because you think you see a gun? You don’t say something first like put your hands up?”

He responds, “It depends. Is it night? Can I see?”

She asks, “What if you were in a white neighborhood and you see a white man wearing a suit driving a mercedes? He could be a drug dealer, right?”

“He could,” he says.

“So if you saw him reaching into the window and you thought that you saw a gun, would you shoot him or would you say put your hands up?” she asks.

“I say put your hands up,” he says.

“Do you hear what you just said?” she sys.

“We live in a complicated world,” he says.

Just like “Do the Right Thing,” the movie shows some nuance. Common’s character displays the police perspective while Starr shows the other side of things. Khalil wasn’t a perfect person, but was he just a result of his neighborhood and circumstances?

Toward the end of the movie, there are protests and riots as the anger erupts. Starr’s father sees his grocery store burn down, but not at the hand of protestors but drug dealers who want to send him a message that Starr should not talk about Khalil’s gang involvement.

It’s an uncomfortable movie but an important one because it shows so many viewpoints and it helps start good conversations.

Just Mercy (2019)

This movie might be the most one-sided. Not that it’s not a good movie. It’s well acted and has a great story but almost every viewer comes to the same conclusion that what happened was wrong. There’s not a lot of gray area in this one. It tells the true story of Bryan Stevenson, the attorney who helps defend people on death row, most of them black men who did not receive fair trials. Throughout the movie you continue to see a system that is stacked against these men. Jamie Foxx, playing a man on death row, says, “You don’t know what it’s like to be guilty since you was born.” While there absolutely is a racial component to this movie, it reads more like an anti-death penalty movie and how no person deserves to die no matter what they did. “Your life still has meaning,” Bryan tells a client. Throughout the movie, you’ll feel frustration and anger but I promise you there’s a happy ending by the conclusion and you’ll find yourself crying at certain parts. The acting is powerful and this might be the hopeful movie you need after watching the more nuanced films like “Do the Right Thing” and “The Hate U Give” which are powerful films but not the most “feel good” or “inspirational.” Indeed, “Just Mercy” is a sad movie but it ends with hope and that’s what a lot of us need right now.