'Shirley' Underscores The Problem With The Great Black Historical Figure Trope

Theres a moment in writer-director John Ridleys new film, Shirley, based on the life and career of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black U.S. congresswoman, when you think its going to finally buckle under its own austere weight and let us see some humanity. 

Shirley (Regina King) is studiously seated back straight, shoulders perfectly squared at her kitchen table telling her husband, Conrad (Michael Cherrie), that her campaign for Democratic party presidential nomination needs more funds. It hasnt gone great. Her run has absorbed tons of money and resources and its in danger of reaching an anticlimactic end.  

Conrad tries in vain to reason with his wife about spending money they dont have. They go back and forth about it for a bit until Shirley lashes out with My money! to indicate, presumably (since the movie never really confirms this), that its her campaign money and she can do whatever she wants with it.  

At this point at the Brooklyn Academy of Music screening of the film earlier this month, someone in the audience let out an audible gasp. Because its the only time in the film when Shirley is uncomposed and in the wrong. Conrad, clearly just as astonished, stares at her before stomping off to get her checkbook, bringing it to her and leaving the room in silence.     

Shirley quickly regains herself and the moment is never referred to again. It doesnt lead to the couple having a big fight, we learn nothing more about their obviously strained relationship, or each of them as individuals, or the matter of their finances.  

Its like if a single block fell out of a Jenga tower, then leapt right back inside the fortress so neatly and nimbly that you wonder if it even happened at all. 

Thats much of the experience watching Shirley, which focuses entirely on Chisholms historic and drama-filled 1972 run for nomination with little curiosity about her personhood.  

We get the obligatory encounters with her racist white male peers in Congress who dont accept her because shes Black, and who she expeditiously puts in check. We get scenes where she reminds her small and mighty (yet exhausted) team, which includes her husband, that she doesnt accept the word cant.  

We also get glimpses of her rousing speeches and encounters with marginalized communities, including her own in Bed-Stuy, utilizing her fluency in Spanish to connect with her supporters. (The film isnt interested in this detail, but she learned the language after minoring in it at Brooklyn College).  

Basically, Shirley has all the ingredients of the Great Black Historical Figure trope weve seen time and again. More on that in a bit. 

What we rarely get are Shirleys more vulnerable moments. While King is, unsurprisingly, terrific at embodying so many elements about Chisholm her faintly Barbadian accent from when she lived on the island as a child, her calculating smile, her fighter spirit and her walk the story doesnt allow her to really live inside her emotions. 

Despite the actors deep dive into Chisholms archive, as the BAM audience is told during the films introduction, what we ultimately get is a one-dimensional rendering. 

Thats neither a good example of Kings talent, particularly after her masterful performance in 2018s If Beale Street Could Talk, nor Ridleys, though hes the same filmmaker who penned 2013s 12 Years A Slave. (Hed also worked with King before on the fantastic drama series American Crime, and it was because of that experience that King, a producer on Shirley, handpicked Ridley to helm the film.)

They both have more than proven that they can handle nuanced portrayals. But this is not a full or textured portrait of Chisholm, even during this specific period.  

Shirley, with a first-name-only title implying the film will be far more personal than it is, teases that its a story about a woman with a vaguely tense relationship with her sister, Muriel (Reina King, Reginas actual sister and a producer as well). Its a story about a woman whose marriage seems like little more than a professional relationship a woman whose devoted relationship with her Christianity precludes her from turning her back on her racist opponent, George Wallace (W. Earl Brown), after hes shot and paralyzed.

I would break bread with the devil if it made him more Christian, Chisholm says to Black Panther Huey Newton (Brad James) of her hospital visit with Wallace.

The film drops bread crumbs the whole time that Shirley has an emotional [?] relationship with New York State Assemblyman Arthur Hardwick Jr. (Terrence Howard), whos also on her team as she runs for nomination. We only learn in the postscript that Chisholm and Hardwick later get married the same year of her divorce from Conrad in 1977. 

Theres a collective aww when the BAM audience reads this on screen, because Hardwick is portrayed as unconditionally supportive even during Chisholms most trying times. Its indeed sweet. But this tension would have been best served in the body of the film, to better humanize its subject.

There had to be more to the strain between Muriel and Shirley than, as the former finally says in the film, their father raising Shirley to be more special than her siblings. And more to the problems between Shirley and Conrad than again, presumably, because the film never really says her lack of respect for him as her partner. And more to how her faith might have clouded her judgment at times.

Shirley feels too timid to disturb the otherwise pristine Jenga tower, revealing all its contents, to its own detriment.  

Audiences can only make assumptions about whats really going on beneath the surface of a character were not really trained to know or be curious about outside of her history-making accomplishments. Yes, she was the first Black candidate to run for a major-party nomination for U.S. president. But who was she? What were her fears, her concerns, her desires beyond that? 

With education around Black American history still so lacking in the U.S. school system, and racial ignorance as prevalent as ever, film has become a de facto medium to teach people about the successes and stories of Black people.   

But in doing so, storytellers can be quick to leapfrog over any potentially prickly or uncomfortable aspects of their narratives, focusing squarely on what made this Great Historical Black Figure so important and neglecting the fact that they were also human. Thats what happens in Shirley. 

Weve see the same thing in other recent fare, like Colman Domingos portrayal of Bayard Rustin in Rustin last year and Kingsley Ben-Adirs Bob Marley in Bob Marley: One Love just last month. Theyre complex figures reduced to the sum of their achievements for the big screen. Thats not great storytelling or a good way to teach history, if thats what theyre trying to do.   

At no point in Shirley or in any of those examples does the audience feel challenged by this portrayal of the subject in the way that something like, say, last years Oppenheimer does, or the 1992 biopic, Malcolm X. Heroes remain unquestionably heroic. The villain in the case of Shirley, sexism, racism and dirty politics is abundantly clear. (Or not clear at all, as is the case in One Love.)

These arent the films any of these figures deserve, and yet Hollywood too often still feels bound, in part by the laws of respectability politics, perhaps, to these noble representations of Black historical figures. Shirley had all the potential to be something better. But it isnt. 

Shirley releases on Netflix Friday.