Regina King blends grace with grit to light this underdog campaigner’s fire
Shirley (2024)
Streaming on Netflix
Shirley Chisholm didn’t like being told no. To kick off this rousing, marvelously acted story of grit and determination, we see Shirley (Regina King) early in 1969 taking on Speaker of the House of Representatives John McCormack.
As is his right, the Speaker makes all committee assignments for newly elected House members, and he’s relegated Chisholm to the Agriculture Committee.
I don’t think so, Chisholm righteously informs the Speaker. As the first African American woman elected to Congress, she wasn’t going to forget the people who elected her. They were from Brooklyn. There were no cows in Brooklyn.
She demanded to be seated on the Veterans Affairs Committee. Undoubtedly there were veterans in Brooklyn.
And what never happened, happened. The Speaker relented to this backtalking upstart. Unheard of.
That wouldn’t be the last time Chisholm was confronted with the Unprecedented and replied, But necessary. Though she doesn’t know it yet, she’s come to rock not just the House but the entire national electoral system.
This House gig wasn’t quickly going to bring her much political clout. But politics offers various ways and means to ascend.
As it happened, before Chisholm was elected, on a visit to Florida, students there had vowed to raise $5,000 to help her run for president. What a sweet, quaint idea, she thought at the time.
But late in 1971 she learns those students have raised $10,000. Screenwriters call this an “inciting incident”, and sure enough, roughly ten minutes into the movie, a gleam fills Shirley’s eye; that $10,000 is seed money. At Christmas, she decides to launch her presidential run in January 1972. The Democratic Party Convention was set for July in Miami.
We need to sharply focus on what we’re watching. This isn’t a biopic. It zeroes in on a six-month uphill battle to win the presidential nomination of a major political party.
Never content with just standing out, Shirley stands up for the disadvantaged
In 1972 Republican Richard Nixon is running for a second term. He hasn’t yet gotten tangled up in Watergate and looks primed to defeat any Democrat.
Shirley’s herculean task, to beat back Democratic rivals McGovern, Humphrey and Muskie in Miami, looks insurmountable. That’s more than enough story for any movie. Some reviewers are saying this one fails at what it never attempts in the first place.
Writer-director John Ridley (who also wrote the screenplay for the 2013 Oscar Best Picture 12 Years a Slave) keeps up the suspense and gets strong performances from a lively cast. Can Shirley pull off an upset when politicos of all stripes say she doesn’t stand a chance?
Even Chisholm loyalists wonder if the doomsayers might be right. Old friend and closest advisor Wesley “Mac” Holder (the late Lance Reddick of The Wire, in a keen-eyed, passionate performance) tells Shirley bluntly she can’t possibly win the nomination.
Friend and former New York State Assembly colleague Arthur Hardwick (Terrence Howard) signs on, but also has serious doubts. And fundraiser Stanley Townsend (Brian Stokes Mitchell) warns that small donations from ordinary people won’t make her even remotely competitive.
Terrence Howard and Lance Reddick as stalwarts who never waver from Shirley
But Shirley forges ahead. Robert Gottlieb (Lucas Hedges), a white Cornell law student and former Chisholm intern, agrees to be national youth organizer. And most surprisingly, Barbara Lee (Christina Jackson), an Oakland, California single mother with connections to the Black Panthers, joins the effort.
You can make a difference working within the system, Shirley promises Lee. (Jackson lights up the screen in a subtle, heartfelt performance.)
And after laboring in the campaign trenches, Lee strikingly comes through for Shirley. In the battleground state of California, which McGovern seems to have in the bag, Lee arranges a meeting for Shirley with Panther founder Huey P. Newton (Brad James).
A scornful Newton mocks the former Brooklyn schoolteacher for dreaming she can reach the presidency.
But Shirley argues that change can take on surprising guises, reminding the young revolutionary that nobody predicted Harriet Tubman or Rosa Parks would make a difference either. In a shock to Black activists nationwide, after the meeting Newton endorses Chisholm for president.
In a jolt from a completely different direction, Shirley pays a hospital visit to a critically wounded George Wallace after the diehard segregationist survives an assassination attempt.
The radical left is disgusted. Shirley insists that a Christian shows compassion to anyone in pain. Wallace, if no one else, appreciates her reaching out, and her audacity.
Though Shirley can attract and mingle with outsiders, her double-crossing opponents come from within the Democratic party, most hurtfully from Black men. Walter Fauntroy (André Holland), D.C.’s delegate to the House, promises to support Shirley but welches on the bargain.
Similarly, California Congressman Ron Dellums (Dorian Missick) pledges to stick with Shirley, but just before the Miami convention roll call vote he caves when McGovern promises him influence in a Democratic administration.
And Black political leadership nationally, in Democratic party and broadly activist circles, had virtually no women in top leadership positions. Shirley was entering a race no Black woman politician had even remotely been groomed for in the past.
She was moving too fast, the dominant Black – and overwhelmingly male – political lions concluded.
Not to be so breezily written off, Shirley fights to the bitter end in Miami. It’s edge-of-your-seat politicking to win a place at the table. She believes her struggle can make a critical difference.
King has a tiger on her hands in portraying Shirley, who could be cunning, cruel, warm, inspiring, politically savvy, hard as nails or morally nuanced, minute to minute.
Those shifting strategies are what make the performance and the movie deeply relevant today.
Historians in the years since have concluded she did. Barack Obama has said that a foundational element of his candidacy was Chisholm’s campaign. She was, as time and Obama’s presidency have proved, not a failure but a forerunner. (In 2015, Obama posthumously awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.)
And this affirmation of blind faith, this defiance that says Yes when forces arrayed against you say No, not yet fuels King’s remarkable performance.
Meryl Streep deservedly won an Oscar portraying Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011), also about a woman forced to contend for power in a male-dominated system.
Like Streep’s witty, teasing, full-bore performance, King’s work here has overlapping layers, jostling Shirley but ultimately driving her forward. It’s early in the year, but for now I can say I’ll be disappointed if King isn’t an Oscar Best Actress nominee for 2024. She’s that good.
This is broad, deep acting. King’s face and voice (she nails the Bajan accent Chisholm never lost from her early years in Barbados) can ripple with conflict then, on a dime, lock in fearlessness.
King’s Shirley has to talk tough to stubborn men. But she can be reduced to tears when she fears she’s letting down her devoted followers, sending them on what looks like a fool’s errand.
King has a tiger on her hands in portraying Shirley. She has to tame this tenacious advocate so we can see her as a woman. Shirley could be cunning, cruel, warm, inspiring, politically savvy, hard as nails or morally nuanced, minute to minute, whatever might be demanded.
Those shifting strategies are what make the performance and the movie deeply relevant today. Now not just women but the whole political order is feeling a push from the bottom, a restlessness in response to a leadership that can’t seem to get a grip.
Politicians are either compromising to the point of cowardice or shouting to the point of ineffectiveness. While the people, no matter how they lean, aren’t comforted by and don’t settle for what they’re being told.
Shirley picks up on that pugnacious, quarrelsome beat in this fractious 2024 national moment. Like the woman herself, such orneriness doesn’t plead. When cornered, Shirley, the woman and the politician, instinctively snarls.
I think her defiance in this movie, that prickly refusal to sit down and shut up, can inspire today.
This movie dramatizes rising up against complacency. I imagine many in the audience will come away wondering about real leaders, knowing how badly we need them, sensing we’d be wise to seize another Shirley whenever one might come along.
Dare we hope that more such fighters are forging a path toward us?