new young lawyer, Captain Davenport (Howard E. Rollins, Jr.) from the JAG. He's black too. No one's ever met a black officer before. As you can imagine, this ruffles a few feathers, especially in Louisiana during the Jim Crow days. Trouble starts immediately. Captain Davenport isn't housed with the other officers. Instead, he's billeted in a deserted barracks on the other side of the base. The first of many insults. But Davenport keeps his cool. He needs to. He has a job to do...well, two jobs really. The first is to find out who murdered Sergeant Waters (Adolph Caeser), and the second is to be an example to everyone, proof that black people can be officers and gentlemen. Rollins is both. Most people think that Waters was killed by one of the local white people, but Davenport has other ideas. He doesn't question the townsfolk; he questions Waters' own men instead. As the film progresses, a portrait of Waters emerges and it ain't a pretty one. Waters was a bitter man, and man driven mad by prejudice and discrimination, a smart man constantly told that he wasn't good enough to go any higher, an Army sergeant constantly referred to as "boy." Slowly his resentment grew over the years, but that resentment wasn't directed at the white people who discriminated against him. Rather, Waters directs it towards his own race, especially towards those blacks that he feels make his race look bad, those who act subservient, those who step-n-fetch, those who lack the degree of gravitas which he feels he possesses. And so, he drives his men. And he torments those he feels aren't doing good enough, torments Private Smalls (David Harris) until he takes his own life. This makes another soldier, Private First Class Peterson (Denzel Washington), very angry. Angry enough to kill.
Based on the Pullitzer Prize winning play by Charles Fuller, Norman Jewison's A Soldier's Story is one of the best movies about racism and its effects that I have ever seen. It portrays racism within the same race, something that results when one race is perpetually discriminated against by
another. Blacks began thinking that if they could just be more "white," then whites would stop discriminating against them. This philosophy led some blacks who attempted to "assimilate" to start looking down on those who didn't. They saw them as weak and inferior. Saw them as holding back the race. Nonsense too, since the only ones holding blacks back were whites. But such is the power of racism. It twists the world into a new reality that in turn twists minds into something altogether new as well. And Sergeant Waters was one twisted man indeed, as he relates how he and his comrades once slit the throat of another black soldier who they felt had shamed their race. Waters felt that Private Smalls shamed his race too. Private Peterson feels that Waters isn't good enough to be black. Captain Davenport wonders who gave these two the right to decide who is and isn't good enough to be black. Smalls and Waters will be laid to rest in the Louisiana soil, but the effects of racism, the effects of slavery, will take a lot longer to lay to rest. But A Soldier's Story seems to hint that it will happen...some day, when the fighting is all over.
A Soldier's Story is rated PG.
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