Movie Review: The Great Debaters

The Great Debaters is a new movie co-produced by Oprah Winfrey and directed by Denzel Washington, who also stars as a teacher who leads an African-American debating team to great success in the '30s.

It's uplifting and heart-warming and it looks great. But it also rewrites history in a way that I couldn't go into in my City Paper review without giving away too much of the plot (personally, I hate knowing too much about a film before I go see it).

Hollywood is infamous abroad for changing historical facts to fit cinematic fiction. An emperor dying in the arena of the Colisseum? I don't think so, but it happened in Gladiator. WWII Americans retrieving the Enigma cypher machine? It occurred in U571, but apparently the US wasn't even in the war when the mission really took place.



Denzel takes a big victory at a relatively small university and sets it in a fancier place, so that his protagonists face America's most prestigious debating team instead. Are the stakes any different because the filmmakers take liberties with the truth and rewrite history to improve the dramatic effect of their story? That's for audience members to decide - but they deserve to know what really happened.

If you've seen the film or you're the kind of person who turns to the end of a book before you've read the rest of it because you can't wait to find out what happens, you can find out more about The Great Debaters' history-bending here.