Movie Review: 'LBJ'

I don’t understand racism. It’s strange to write that down but it’s no less true, racism doesn’t make any sense. Why does skin color matter? What is it about skin color that bothers people? What could possibly cause a person to believe that their skin makes them superior? It baffles me. Life is hard enough, why carry such an unnecessary and bizarre hatred on top of that? I find that in my life I need as many friends as I can make. The world makes more sense when you connect with people. To rule out connecting with someone over something like the color of their skin is just not something I can make any sense of.

I’m not seeking to understand racists; I know that they are just wrong in their hatred but I can’t understand the conviction that drives them. Is it some sort of misguided notion of maleness? Tribalism that has yet to be evolved out of the species? What drives people to hate someone for a reason such as skin color? Hatred of any kind is hard on the soul. I am certainly not without hate, I hate racists, I hate those who hate the LGBTQ Community, I hate those who would seek to oppress others. Carrying that hate is the biggest burden of my life but I do it because I can’t not do it. My hatred makes sense because I hate on behalf of others. The hatred that comes from the racist simply makes no sense.

This is a longwinded way of getting around to reviewing the new Rob Reiner movie LBJ which hinges on the debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The brilliant actor Richard Jenkins portrays a Senator Russell from Georgia whose hatred of black people has lost him to history to the point where I cannot recall his first name and would not be aware of his existence without this movie. That’s fair, he doesn’t deserve to be remembered. Nor do any of the Senators who opposed civil rights. Remembering that they opposed something as fundamental as civil rights for all people is enough of an awful legacy for these men.

LBJ paints a complex portrait of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. It is a heroic portrait but one that doesn’t shy away from the less heroic aspects of Lyndon Johnson who, before he became Vice President had consistently opposed civil rights legislation. President Johnson's change of heart wasn’t him being ‘woke’ to use the modern parlance, it was born of pragmatism, at once coldly calculated and genuinely felt. President Johnson could see the direction the country was moving in and was determined to remain relevant and, he had become friendly with his cook, a black woman who could not travel safely and comfortably from Washington D.C to Texas despite working for the Vice President of the United States.

Yes, President Johnson was one of those people who were so selfish and self-involved that they were able to ignore reality until reality proved to be an inconvenience. It took his personal cook not being able to drive his dog to Texas for him for the Vice President of the United States to finally understand what black people who were not his personal cook were going through. It’s a position to be condemned undoubtedly but, as the movie demonstrates, he did try to make up for it in his way.

We are left with so many complicated legacies in our American history, supposedly admirable people who committed horrors that we’d rather not remember. LBJ is not a portray of a brave patriot, it’s a complex coming to terms story that deifies one aspect of President Johnson while backgrounding the less acceptable aspects of the man. The film celebrates LBJ’s courageous decision to side with the late President Kennedy on Civil Rights while reminding us that his heart wasn’t always in the right place on the issue.

Sadly, this is accomplished in rather simple terms. President Johnson, as portrayed by Woody Harrelson, comes off as a charmingly pragmatic hero. He’s a good ol’ boy but he’s also made the right decision when it mattered the most. He once believed in segregation but changed his mind when he was convinced that the position was politically unsustainable and when it seemed to inconvenience him personally. These are rather pat answers, simple and easy to follow.

That said, the film is far too simple. Johnson is heroically, if a little too late, woke. He does the right thing eventually but likely not for the right reasons. A better filmmaker might be able to get this idea across with more power but Reiner simply wants to make it easy and palatable. Under Reiner’s direction, Harrelson’s LBJ is a kooky racist uncle, an Archie Bunker type who is forced into the modern world and the modern way of thinking. That’s just way too easy, it’s politics for the masses and frankly, real history deserves better.

Reiner's style is better suited to television. His dark sets and low budget cinematography doesn't shine well on the big screen. Reiner is a solid craftsman but his talent is not in great design or memorable settings; he's a solid observer but that's about it. Everything looks just a little cheap, just a little compromised, much like the way history is boiled down to bite sizes, easy to digest.

LBJ did however, at the very least, cause me to consider why people hate. The film struck a deep chord about what it is that drives people to oppress others. I came away with no good answers but I like the questions and I hope others will ask those questions. Why do you feel superior to others? What is it about you that makes you think you can’t share the world with people of other races? LBJ has no answers and I didn’t expect it to but it does offer these valuable questions and for that I appreciate it, even as I am not sold on it as a piece of pop history.