Though he occasionally uses a broad brush dipped in primary colors while sculpting his admiring portrait of Bob Zellner, the grandson of a Ku Klux Klansman who was unlikely to become a civil rights activist in the early 1960s, filmmaker Barry Alexander eschews it Brown most skillfully and intelligently uses the “white savior” clichés that such scenarios in “Son of the South” have in common. Based on Zellner’s memoir, “The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerners in the Freedom Movement,” which will be available in limited runs and on digital platforms starting February 5, Brown’s well-crafted and contemporary compelling biopic strikes dramatically to emotionally satisfying balance the moral awakening of its white protagonist and his relationships with sometimes encouraging, sometimes skeptical black leaders and foot soldiers.
The opening minutes of the film show how dangerous it could be for a white southerner to be viewed as a “racial traitor” in the days of segregation, and that threat continues to seep just below the surface after “Son of the South” flashes back a few months, to find Bob Zellner (Lucas Till, consistently dedicated and sincere) near his graduation from Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Ala.
Bob is significantly more enlightened than most of his classmates, but by no means a crusader. He heads out with friends to research a term paper on racial relations by interviewing Rev. Ralph Abernathy (Cedric the Entertainer) and Rosa Parks (Sharonne Lanier) appear at a local church on the fifth anniversary of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott -56. One of Bob’s professors (Nicole Ansari-Cox), a German émigré who explicitly refers to her testimony to the brutality of the Nazis, strongly advises him to avoid a potentially flammable situation. In fact, even Abernathy tells the big-eyed white boy that he might not know what he’s up for. But Bob persists – and is almost arrested and almost driven from Huntingdon.
One thing leads to another, and Bob is brought into contact with personable white liberals, including the real British journalist Jessica Mitford (disconcertingly played by Sienna Guillory as just a little less dizzy than Geraldine Chaplin’s BBC correspondent in Nashville). More importantly, he opened his eyes to Rosa Parks, who reveals that she was hardly the random heroine her myth suggests when she refused to give up her place on a segregated bus. There are times, she says to Bob, when it takes a pragmatic calculation while keeping an eye on the price.
(This is probably a good place to note that both Sharonne Lanier and Cedric the Entertainer should be kept on speed dial for anyone planning a full-length biography of any of the civil rights icons depicted here.)
Bob’s Methodist ministerial father (Byron Herlong), who was converted from racism long ago during a unique experience mentioned relatively late in Son of the South, literally bless his son when Bob sets out on a path to of the Freedom Riders in Birmingham and protesters in McComb, Miss. (A nice touch: a young black woman marching next to him in McComb is positively baffled when she realizes that not only is he “walking by,” he’s actually white.) But Carole Anne (Lucy Hale) Bob’s initially supportive fiancée Ultimately, as initially supportive fiancees usually do in stories like these, expresses disapproval that ends engagement. If he asks what Jesus could do, if only for the sake of reasoning, she has none of it: “We both know you are nobody’s savior.” He cannot deny that.
And then there’s Bob’s grandfather, who is fearlessly played by Brian Dennehy in one of his last film appearances as an outrageous and incorrigible white supremacist who doesn’t need clan robes to boldly flaunt his true colors. Dennehy’s late career as a lovable character in “Driveways” has rightly achieved a lot. But if there are posthumous awards to be generated, it should really be triggered by his work here, if only for the scene in which his character Bob terrifyingly warns when he sees his grandson in a civil rights demonstration: “I’ll say one Bullet in your head, my own damn me. “He doesn’t raise his voice. He does not have to.
On the other side of segregation, Lex Scott Davis brings a welcome amount of conviction to the thinly-written, borderline-stereotypical role of Joanne, a well-educated young black woman who is sharp enough to beat Bob at chess and cute enough to assess him as a possible treasure. Chaka Forman, aptly cast as his father, civil rights activist James Forman, brings just the right touch of disbelief during his early interactions with Bob. And Shamier Anderson steals every scene that isn’t bolted to the ground as Reggie, a veteran movement who suspects the worst about Bob and doesn’t seem to care whether he’s right or wrong for a long time.
After decades of exemplary work as editor for Spike Lee (who is executive producer on this film), Mira Nair, and Tony Kaye, it is no surprise that writer and director Brown is so adept at weaving archive news into his film smoothly and convincingly Story in “Son of the South”. But he also impresses with his expertise when it comes to vivid memories of the 1960s Deep South. All that redneck talk about “commies” in the civil rights movement may sound silly, but it will apply to anyone who has lived or explored the era of film.
Better still, his fictionalized – and largely romanticized – drama could inspire many viewers to learn more about the events depicted in “Son of the South” by trying a documentary like Stanley Nelson’s “Freedom Riders” (2010), which recently released appeared was added to the National Film Registry. To be honest, these two films would be a thought-provoking double bill.
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