Movie review: 'The Great Debaters'

In the earnest historical drama "The Great Debaters." Denzel Washington, one of the premier leading men of today, and Forest Whitaker, character actor extraordinaire, finally go toe-to-toe in a big movie moment.

It's a disagreement between colleagues, two professors at tiny, all-black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. They argue. They smile. They banter. It turns heated and passionate, but they keep it civil. It's exactly the way an argument between academics who have to work together should play, and the heat, twists and turns last only a minute or so.

But you would swear, watching the two Oscar-winners closely, that they get a little carried away with playing opposite each other. And realizing that, they let themselves be tickled over the whole idea of meeting their acting match.

It's a magical moment in "Debaters," a workmanlike civil-rights-history film clad in sports-drama clothes. The "sport" here is college debate, and in the 1930s, nobody took that more seriously than Wiley College. Washington plays the coach, Melvin Tolson, one of those teachers who strolls into the classroom, climbs up on his desk, and inspires.

Whitaker is Dr. Farmer, theologian, preacher, also inspiring, charging the students at this teacher's college with leading "the way out of ignorance, out of darkness."

In the 1935 Jim Crow/lynch-happy South, Wiley College is a veritable monastery where the intellectual seeds will be planted and tended for a harvest of "equal justice for all."

School is also "the only place where you can read all day, except for prison," which is why Henry Lowe (Nate Parker, very good) is there. He's a rebel, a womanizing, blues-listening liquor-drinker who doesn't quite fit in at this Methodist school. But he is the heart of the debate team.

Samantha Booke (Jurnee Smollett) knows just how many black female lawyers there are in Texas and America in 1935. She aims to join their ranks, which is why she's debating. She's the soul.

And Dr. Farmer's precocious 14-year-old son (Denzel Whitaker, no relation to either star) is the brains, the master researcher who helps build the foundation that will take Wiley to glory.

That is, if you've ever been to a sports movie, the road we're on — "Glory Road." We see the "training sequence," enunciation exercises, the war of wills between the "star" and the coach, and a "big debate" in the finale. The team has to face racism, personality clashes, romantic rivalry and that defining moment that focuses them on the prize — the arguments that will make America a better place to live. They debate, first other black colleges, then white ones, on such subjects as the welfare state and civil disobedience.

Washington, making this movie for Oprah Winfrey's production company, keeps the kids in the foreground even as he shows us the underground-union-activist side to his own character. A device of filming the debates as black-and-white home movies doesn't work. The history isn't literal, either: Their "big game" wasn't against Harvard but USC. John Heard is the obligatory racist sheriff trying to keep both blacks and poor whites down, suppressing union activities.

Though it's a little calculating, "The Great Debaters" is history at its most entertaining.

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