Antwone Fisher: DVD & Movie Review (2002)

(Originally published 2002)

Denzel Washington's "Antwone Fisher," from a script Antwone Fisher based on his own life, is about a troubled sailor forced to face his demons with the help of a psychiatrist forced to face his own at home.

The film marks Washington’s first time as a director and it recalls a wealth of other movies, from "The Prince of Tides" and "Good Will Hunting" to "Ordinary People" and "Finding Forrester," without becoming them.

It’s its own movie, an accomplishment George Clooney failed to achieve in his recent "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," which found the actor creating a film that wasn’t so much about Chuck Barris and his dual life as a game show host and CIA hitman, as it was a movie about a director pulling out his hair in a messy attempt to find a personal style.

This isn’t so for "Fisher." Although the movie is formulaic and at times predictable, it’s also beautifully measured and assured, a confident, extraordinarily well-acted film about a man overcoming a dark life of murder, incest, abuse and abandonment.

In spite of what Fisher endured, the movie resists becoming the all-out melodrama it could have become in the wrong hands, which is surely its finest quality.

In the film, newcomer Derek Luke is Fisher, a young seaman whose blistering temper and eagerness to fight leads him to an appointment with Dr. Jerome Davenport (Washington), a Naval psychiatrist with troubles of his own—his marriage to Berta (Salli Richardson) is on the rocks--who is unprepared for the emotional connection that will form between him and Fisher.

Fisher is just as unprepared. Indeed, after several sessions in which he stubbornly refuses to say anything, he eventually opens up to Davenport and shares his life, a horror story of the first order that began with his birth in prison to a mother who refused to care for him.

Bounced from a series of foster homes, he eventually came to the home of Mrs. Tate (Novella Nelson), a cruel preacher’s wife who refused to call Antwone and his two foster brothers by their real names because, in spite of being black herself, she preferred to lash out and call them "niggers" while tying them up and beating them senseless.

I watched "Antwone Fisher" immediately preceding ABC's "Living with Michael Jackson," which wasn't planned--it was just the way things worked out--but as the film ended and Jackson's own story of child abuse and its ramifications began, the two stories gradually came to complement each other.

Here were two black men, abused as boys, who had everything against them becoming successful but who nevertheless achieved great success as adults. Seeing them both back-to-back deepened the cumulative effect, further elevating Fisher’s hard-won personal triumphs while creating a greater fracture in the troubled man Michael Jackson has become.

With an Academy Award-worthy performance by Luke and fine supporting turns by Joy Bryant as his love interest and Viola Davis as his mother, "Antwone Fisher" wisely holds back on delivering its emotional wallop until its well-deserved ending, which won’t be revealed here but which lifts this powerful movie off the screen while transcending the race and color boundaries that might unfortunately limit its commercial appeal.Indeed, in the end, "Antwone Fisher" is about all of us.

Grade: A-