Review: MLK/FBI | Gripping and Revealing
By Kyle Osborne
More than half a century after his assassination, one would have thought that we’d seen and heard all there was to learn about Martin Luther King, Jr. Certainly anyone past grade school can recite at least one of the civil rights leader’s notable quotes. The images are embedded in our brain.
What makes the new documentary “MLK/FBI” instantly engaging is that it comes with fresh content and a new stylistic take on things that makes it feel less like a required viewing in History class and more like watching a “real movie.”
For sure there are the usual biographical stations at which one must stop along the way, but it doesn’t take long before director Sam Pollard has taken us into less familiar territory, showing us images and film clips we’ve probably never seen, and telling us a granular story that we’d only heard in bits and pieces before. It becomes a King vs. J. Edgar Hoover (the head of the FBI for nearly half a century) story.
Yes, King was serially unfaithful to his wife, Coretta Scott King. Yes, King associated with a man, Stanley Levinson, who was a known Communist to the FBI at a time when you could not be anything worse – except a black man who was a “trouble-maker” and a threat, or so many saw it, to the status quo. It was ostensibly King’s having lied about his continuing friendship with Levinson that lead to then Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, to grant the surveillance that Hoover so keenly sought.
I’ll leave it to the viewer to discover what the bugs, taps, and stalking revealed, but suffice to say that Hoover became obsessed with taking King down, and enraged that his findings were largely ignored by the Press and others at the time. The lengths to which the bureau went to try to take ruin the leader between 1963 and 1968 are shocking, even by today’s standards.
Meanwhile, King remained outwardly calm and focused, even in the face of blatantly racist questioning by the media and the public. For every incendiary query, he had a thoughtful, truthful answer. Do you remember that he won the Nobel Peace Prize? I’d forgotten. Pollard’s quick trip down that side street and its effects is just one example of going beyond the familiar sketches, if only for the film footage from Sweden.
We see that MLK was a Baptist preacher, but not a saint. He cheated on his wife, but not on his followers. He was a flawed human being, but his mission was not diminished by that.
Pollard’s artistic choice to leave all the talking heads as just unseen voices (until the very end, just before the credits) is a wise one. The juxtaposition of the footage up front with the knowledgeable voices underneath keeps the narrative, as I said, feeling like a “movie”: well-paced and, dare I say it, entertaining.
To See MLK/FBI screening information click: https://www.mlkfbi.com/
