Because I’ve been on the road essentially for a month straight, I haven’t gotten a chance to see Red Tails yet. Fortunately, reader JCS, has, and has some thoughts.

By JCS

Red Tails is certainly not a great film. In fact, the critical consensus suggests that it’s not even a particularly good film. However, most of its critics proceed from a basic misunderstanding of its place in the combat film canon and the cultural work it does to restore African Americans to their rightful place in a history from which they often have been excluded.

This is not to suggest that the film is without its flaws. The overly long running time creates some pacing problems. The villains are devilishly cartoonish in the most Raiders of the Lost Ark way possible. The dialogue is often as corny as we’ve come to expect from any production that involves George Lucas. And, perhaps most jarring of all, the general atmosphere is more befitting a 1945 than a 2012 film, right down to the score. It is dated in many ways, but intentionally so.

Its throwback aesthetic to the World War II era combat film is a choice that structures the film’s other flawed components. Ignoring the historical conventions of this genre allows critics to judge Red Tails as the film they wish it was, instead of the film that it is. Take, for example, the clichéd characters of the 332nd fighter group. There’s Lightning (David Oyelowo), the maverick who plays by his own rules. His best friend, Easy (Nate Parker), is the by-the-book squad leader. There’s a “Joker” for comic relief, a devout “Deacon,” and even a couple of versions of “The Kid.”

These stock characters provoke some eye-rolling. But they represent a deliberate attempt by the screenwriters to place the Tuskegee Airmen firmly within the tradition of the combat film narrative. Archetypes like this have always been intrinsic to that genre’s formula. The filmmakers are educating contemporary audiences about African Americans’ role in World War II by placing them within a familiar popular cultural form. The actors’ exceptional performances make this possible. Specifically, the relationship between Lightning and Easy forms the film’s emotional core, getting the audience invested enough to forgive some of the production’s more hackneyed aspects. The entire cast is superb. The Wire alums (director Anthony Hemingway was an assistant director on 23 episodes) Tristan Wilds, Michael B. Jordan, and Andre Royo handle themselves with aplomb. Terrance Howard is as characteristically solid as Cuba Gooding, Jr. is uncharacteristically restrained. And Bryan Cranston and Gerald McRaney do well in minor roles as skeptical military brass.
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The Times Magazine’s profile of George Lucas is very interesting, particularly in its description of how his long-term girlfriend, Mellody Hobson, or as Al Sharpton calls her, “black America’s business princess,” has transmitted Lucas’s dedication to racial equality and channeled it more directly into politics, whether calling Obama a Jedi or showing up for the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. And it captures his determination to make Red Tails a truly black movie (he’s joked about Spike Lee making a prequel to it):

“They say, Now, who are you making this for?”

“I’m making it for black teenagers.”…

“And you’re going to be very patriotic — you’re making a black movie that’s patriotic?”

“They have a right to have their history just like anybody else does,” Lucas said. “And they have a right to have it kind of Hollywood-ized and aggrandized and made corny and wonderful just like anybody else does. Even if that’s not the fashion right now.” [...]

To execute his popcorn vision of “Red Tails,” Lucas turned to Anthony Hemingway, a 36-year-old director who made his name on TV shows like “The Wire.” Hemingway, who had never directed a feature film, comes from the church of David Simon, which values moral murkiness over naïveté, documentary detail about East Baltimore over an ethnography of the Ewok village. It was like hiring a “Hill Street Blues” veteran to direct “Return of the Jedi.”

But from the beginning, Lucas wanted “Red Tails” to have a black director. “I thought, This is the proper way to do this,” he said. Indeed, to scan the credits in “Red Tails” is to see Lucas’s fidelity to African-American filmmakers. There are two black writers and a black executive producer. Terence Blanchard, a Spike Lee collaborator (“Jungle Fever,” “Malcolm X”), wrote the score, and Art Sims, another Lee veteran, designed the one-sheet.

I really hope Red Tails does well not simply to disprove the idea that black leads can’t open blockbusters or that black history is a niche genre. Lucas has said that this will be his last blockbuster. So if the movie makes bank, maybe Lucas could do for black artists what Tyler Perry hasn’t entirely done yet, and what Queen Latifah still might do: spread the wealth and give a financial springboard to projects that could be commercially viable if only they could find financing and support, and an imprimatur that would reassure distributors. The battle might be to get individual non-white (or for that matter, female) writers and directors credentialed and established. But the war is about getting a lot of them in the game.

Given Tyler’s post last week arguing that “The conversation we need to have is one in which minorities think about what kinds of economic models will make it possible for them to make cultural products for themselves and about the way we’d have to redefine what success means in order to do that,” and our debates about what Tyler Perry’s done with the power he’s assumed in Hollywood, I’ve been particularly curious about what Queen Latifah’s going to do with her Flavor Union studio. Turns out her first project is going to be a crime drama that involves Cam’ron and Deadwood veteran Omar Gooding committing credit card fraud. As much as that’s not a project that interests me, this sort of conventional-sounding and economically un-risky thing probably makes sense for a fledgling, black-owned studio. The more you prove you’re economically viable, the more leeway you have to do something boundary-pushing or downright weird without pressure to make bank on that, too.

Of course, it would also be nice to demonstrate to white studio heads and white investors that so-called risks on features with black stars will pay off, and handsomely. One of the reasons Red Tails is such a key test movie for black blockbusters is that George Lucas has spent so much money on it. I honestly thought I’d misheard the numbers the first time I heard them, but Lucas has spent $58 million making the movie and $35 million on promotion. That’s not insane in a world where $100 million-plus budgets for movies are no longer shocking, but it’s a lot of cheddar for even a very rich man to splash out on a project. It would be really nice to have a world where black — and minority, period — Hollywood power brokers’ successes weren’t always seen as flukes or the result of extremely rigid formulas. And to have a world where white dudes were interested and invested in backing minority projects for fun and profit.

The bridge is yours.

-I really hope George Lucas doesn’t decide to be a jerk and shut down a proposed Death Star PR series.

-I hated The Help, but Viola Davis is definitely remarkable in it.

-I will watch anything Katee Sackhoff is in.

-Louis C.K.: predictably smart about what winning an Emmy would do for him and FX.

-The more the adaptation of The Hunger Games emphasizes its critique of reality television, the happier I will be:

Especially given the conversations we’ve been having about Captain America: The First Avenger’s whitewashing of the history of segregation in the armed forces in World War II, I’m moderately excited about Red Tails, the movie Lucas executive produced about the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-black Air Force unit that served with distinction in that conflict:

A lot of this looks like it will be a fairly standard enthusiastic integration movie, which is fine. But I’m glad to see the trailer, at least, give a nod to the extent to which the military resisted accepting the service of talented African-American pilots, even at a point when the air war wasn’t going well for the States. “I don’t believe your boys have scored a single arial kill,” a white officer says with the air of having won some sort of argument, only to have Terrence Howard bat back at him “It’s damn hard to shoot down the enemy 100 miles behind the front lines.” I hadn’t known this before looking into it, but apparently the reason the school was at Tuskegee in the first place was because after a campaign to force Congress to allocate funding for training black pilots, the Defense Department responded by shunting the money to civilian programs. It’s an impressive demonstration of racism that the normally acquisitive Defense Department would turn down an opportunity to take money if it meant taking black people. In any case, given the reverence normally attached to our military in pop culture, it’s a good thing to see this kind of internal critique show up in the movies, particularly prestige ones.

And as much ill-will as I have stored up about Lucas, this actually looks kind of in his wheelhouse. He’s always been better at the flyboys-with-destiny stuff than anything else.