Don’t get me wrong. The facts of the story, chronicled in a book by Osha Gray Davidson, are eye-opening and inspiring, and the film, written and directed by Robin Bissell, includes some fascinating details about the granular challenges of local politics. As Ellis and Atwater, Sam Rockwell and Taraji P. Henson do what you expect Oscar-nominated actors to do: They clarify and complicate their characters, paying attention to their individuality even as the movie loads them up with symbolic baggage.
Ellis loves his family and hates black people, which makes him a fairly normal white person of his time and place. Unlike other movies on similar subjects, “The Best of Enemies” doesn’t treat racial prejudice as a freakish, isolated pathology, but rather as an unremarkable, omnipresent fact of life. Ellis and his Klan brothers aren’t especially extreme. They carry membership cards in their wallets and are openly allied with many of Durham’s political leaders and prominent white citizens, who are fighting a rear-guard action against racial progress.
As the movie begins, those forces of reaction seem to be winning. Despite the civil rights legislation of the previous decade, Atwater still argues for basic fairness in front of a City Council composed entirely of white men, one of whom makes a show of turning his back on her when she speaks. Nearly 20 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the schools in Durham are still segregated. When a fire damages the black school that one of Atwater’s daughters attends, she and other parents, supported by the NAACP, argue that white and black children should be educated together. Ellis and his friends are appalled by the idea.
There have been movies that dramatize social change via courtroom debates, street demonstrations and legislative struggles. “The Best of Enemies” is the first I have seen that focuses on a charrette, a term borrowed from design that basically means a period of enforced, deadline-driven discussion. Under the impressively patient guidance of Bill Riddick (Babou Ceesay), a Raleigh-based specialist in this kind of nonviolent process, black and white citizens gather every day to talk. The hope is that by spending time together and working in common, they will discover tools of civility and compromise.
It would be interesting to observe the fine grain of this process, a form of nonviolent, democratic politics that seems both wildly idealistic and soberly practical. But the charrette serves as a backdrop for the far more conventional story of a white man’s change of heart and the black woman who brought it about.
The political moral of the movie is that change happens when the oppressed are nice to their oppressors. Atwater takes it on herself to do a kindness for Ellis’ family, and this causes him to question his beliefs. Meanwhile, his fellow racists, in and out of the Klan, set about intimidating white charrette participants who seem likely to support integration. Ellis, in breaking with his side, risks ostracism and worse.
There is real danger there, and “The Best of Enemies” doesn’t sugarcoat it. But it makes nearly all its emotion and suspense depend on what the white people will do. We see a lot of Ellis’ domestic and social activities, getting to know his wife, Mary (Ann Heche), and his best Klan buddy, Floyd (Wes Bentley). But we barely catch a glimpse of Atwater’s children, or set foot inside her house. African-American life in Durham is all but invisible, which means that the political, religious and cultural roots of the real story remain offscreen.
As do its implications. Like many other movies — “Green Book” being the most recent and popular example — “The Best of Enemies” invites you to believe that racism lies safely in the past. It may not have died the minute C.P. Ellis saw the error of his ways, but the public conversion of a Klansman surely meant its days were numbered. You would never guess that school integration in particular remains an elusive goal, resisted not only by sheet-wearing whites in the South but also by avowed liberals in Northern cities and suburbs.
Rather than illuminating the politics of the present by examining the struggles of the past, Bissell lurches from folksy comedy to clattering melodrama, producing the opposite of enlightenment. To quote an old protest song: When will we ever learn?
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‘The Best of Enemies’ is rated PG-13. Meanness and menace. Running time: 2 hours 12 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.