Sidney

Chronicling the outstanding career and life of the late American actor, filmmaker, activist, and family man Sidney Poiter, who was the very first black actor to win the Best Actor Oscar, director Reginald Hudlin and producer Oprah Winfrey’s documentary film titled Sidney bestows a congenial, deeply resonant assessment of actors, biographers, collaborators, filmmakers, industry types, and family members who either experienced Poiter’s life journeys or are well-versed in his careers. Sidney Poiter himself is also interviewed throughout the course of the film, where he is able to speak for himself about his own personal experiences and reflections on his life and career. In this well-rounded documentary, Sidney assembles compelling interviews, archival footage of Poiter interviews, and clips of many of the films he starred in, and provides a well-rounded run-through in a milieu that is both political and deeply personal for the iconic Hollywood legend. The documentary, produced by Oprah Winfrey, is a work of grace and dignity.

This is a documentary that will certainly carry on Poiter’s grand legacy. Shot before he passed away, the film opens with Poiter talking directly into the camera. He shares his experiences of how he was born two months earlier, in which his father was going to be unhealthy and was ready to bury him in a showbox in the Bahamas. His mother persisted in keeping him alive because she felt he would have a radiant future. Poiter was informed about this as he grew older, and this always pushed him to live a life of determination and to always go after life’s experiences. We also learn that his mother was a very caring mother and his father held great principles as a family man, which would lead to Poiter also being an actor and a man of principles.

Along with Poiter’s own persona insights and experiences growing up under horrendous Jim Crow laws and enduring racism and prejudice in Miami, the documentary does a deep dive into Poiter’s early acting career as well. We get interviews with his daughters, his widowed wife Jonna Shimkus, ex-wife Juanita Hardy, biographer Adam Goudsauzia, filmmaker Spike Lee, historian Nelson George, Opra Winfrey, and actors Halle Berry, Morgan Freeman, Katherine Houghton, Barbara Streisand, and Denzel Washington.

The documentary backtracks and enters fan letter territory during the halfway point, which is logical because it’s approved by Poiter and his family himself. The film does neglect the more complex and troubling aspects of Poiters’ decade-long affair with Diahann Carroll, which is briefly skimmed over and never shows the hardship it brought to the family. The omission of this prevents Sidney from being a raw and compromised documentary, though everything else is illuminated throughout the documentary.

A considerable amount of attention is given to Poiters’ breakthrough moments in bigger Hollywood movies in the early 50s. The film focuses on how Joseph L. Mankiewicz, at the time, wanted to be more diverse and inconclusive in his films, which led him to cast Poiter as the co-star in the 1950 drama No Way Out, in which he played a black doctor who endured racism and intolerance after he’s accused of malpractice by one of the brothers who were sent to the hospital after suffering injuries from a robbery. The film also highlights other substantial roles he had in such memorable pieces of cinema like A Raisin in the Sun, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and, of course, his big Oscar-winning performance in Lilies of the Field.

The film also chronicles how Poiter faced criticism and polarization in the black community, with films like The Defiant Ones and Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? that originated the “White Savior” trope that uses black characters in films to reassure white audiences that they can live together in peace, which were always written by white liberals to appease white audiences instead of black audiences. The film gets involved with the climatic sequence, which is also explored in Pack’s 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro, where playwright and author James Baldwin explains how Poiter jumps off the train afterward to spare Tony Curtis, which appeased white audiences and left black audiences wishing Poiter just stayed on the train.

The film also chronicles the Red Scare, the traumas in the Black community after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the race riots of the 60’s, and the Civil Rights movement that Sidney Poiter certainly participated in. Some of the most engaging moments are when the documentary focuses on his friendship and collaborations with Harry Belafonte, where their friendship had many highs and lows over the years that ended on a high note between two men. They were certainly rivals; Harry Bellefonte was able to turn down numerous roles at the time because he could pay the bills with his music, where Poiter only had acting. However, Sidney wasn’t a doormat on set either. The film’s admirable elicits how Sidney always made wise creative decisions with each role that would never demean or belittle him. If it’s something his father wouldn’t tolerate, it’s something Sidney wouldn’t take on in the script. Essentially, he saw his father in each role he was cast in.

Die-hard Poiter fans and film theorists will probably opine that Sidney doesn’t go deep enough in its 110-minute runtime. You could easily do a mini-series on his career. But it functions commendably well as a powerful tribute to such an icon that can allow many fans and film buffs to rediscover–or new viewers to discover his work for the first time–an impressive array of many great performances and essential films that he starred in and directed. All around, it’s an informative pastiche of both movie history and what defines a man that’s both enlightening and deeply moving.