Our World

I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO (B+) - It's all too much. Even on the second viewing, this documentary about the works of writer James Baldwin was too overwhelming to take in.

Baldwin is brilliant in this meditation on race relations, but the presentation by Raoul Peck too often overwhelms Baldwin's own words with distracting and discordant images. This is a profound polemic but it can be difficult to follow at times.

This production has its roots in a project conceived by Baldwin in the 1970s -- a rumination on the lives of martyred civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. It is his 30-page pitch expanded to 90 minutes, fleshed out with video clips of Baldwin and other snippets of his writings.

During each screening, I wanted to walk out halfway through and head straight to a bookstore to stock up on Baldwin's canon. Or watch full clips of him online. Peck draws heavily from two mid- to late-'60s appearances of his in particular: one addressing scholars at Cambridge in London and the other on Dick Cavett's talk show, where Baldwin fields the host's awkward questions and even gets into a dust-up with an old-fogey philosopher. Pick up a gun and utter "Give me liberty or give me death," Baldwin observes, and you are a hero if you are a white man; if a black man were to do the same, he would be branded a criminal.

There are many moments of such insight -- as profoundly relevant now as they were then. But Peck, a talented filmmaker (mostly in TV), just crams too much into each frame. Invariably, we get narration, background music, and urgent images competing for our attention. And too often, those three pieces don't go together well. After announcing the death of Evers, the camera floats along above a swamp while a grimy version of "Baby Please Don't Go" plays. As a an extended scene from a 1931 Hollywood musical plays, we hear Baldwin's story about mistaking a woman at a local store for Joan Crawford, who certainly isn't the starlet tap-dancing her heart out on screen. While Baldwin ties together the legacies of the three civil rights leaders, Peck lingers on a photograph of Baldwin sitting with three little girls (daughters? who knows?); when a narrator intones, "Not one of these three lived to be 40," there's a disconnect -- the girls? wait, wasn't he gay? oh, the three civil-rights icons! Early in the film, as the narration announces the author's return to New York from a Paris exile, the camera ogles the brights lights and garish video screens of a present-day Times Square.

And it is all narrated by an unrecognizable Samuel L. Jackson, who, apparently out of reverence, caresses each word, intoning his lines with a god-like near-whisper, sometimes seeming to run out of breath at the end of a sentence. Just another distraction.

But Peck knows when to get out of the way and let Baldwin riff. And some of the visual collages he creates can be mesmerizing. Slow-motion footage of Barack and Michelle Obama striding along their inaugural parade route in 2008 feels like heart-tugging nostalgia from a long-gone era. And the graphics throughout are elegant -- black-on-white type alternating, most appropriately, with white-on-black.

While he leans a bit too much on movie and TV images, Peck alights on some powerful scenes. Baldwin's insights into the interracial homoerotic undertones of movies like "In the Heat of the Night" or "The Defiant Ones" are eye-opening. He observes that the classic cinematic fade-out kiss has little to do with love or sex but rather speaks to reconciliation. One major theme is the media's depiction of white privilege and vanilla social mores. When he presents a clip from a Doris Day movie from 1961, a close-up of the wholesome actress's face dissolves into that of a lynched body hanging from a tree. It is startling, unsettling and loaded with meaning.

If only Peck could have taken his time to do full justice to Baldwin and the timeless sagacity that urgently deserves a modern audience. This is a film that demands to be seen, but one that challenges you to absorb it in one sitting.

BONUS TRACK
The soundtrack is solid, filled with gritty blues songs. But the closing credits finally complete the link from the past to the present, with Kendrick Lamar's "The Blacker the Berry":