“Malcolm X: Make It Plain,” a two-and-a-half-hour documentary airing Jan. 26 on PBS, sets out to capture the essence of this complicated man. In his 39 years, Malcolm displayed myriad facets: hustler, ascetic, hatemonger, peace seeker. He was a fearless truth teller who distorted his own past; a shy man who was brazenly outspoken; a lover of life who courted death and who calmly prophesied his violent end. Producer-director Orlando Bagwell– working under executive producer (“Eyes on the Prize”) Henry Hampton–tells this story unobtrusively, allowing it to unfold largely through the testimony of an array of Malcolm’s intimates, including siblings Wilfred, Philbert and Yvonne, the actor Ossie Davis, and writers Sonia Sanchez and Maya Angelou.
The program is an engaging and subtly detailed portrait. It is not to be confused with investigative journalism. Bagwell doesn’t try to demolish an icon or unearth embarrassing scandal. Occasionally a detractor surfaces (most notably in the person of Capt. Joseph X, a Fruit of Islam official who believes Malcolm to be a traitor to his religion), but Bagwell essentially is host to a sort of reunion at which beloved family members and old associates reminisce about the great man who once walked among them. Though the documentary purports to be the story of Malcolm’s life, it is mostly the story of his public life, with only occasional glimpses at the man behind the facade.
That the documentary is less than totally satisfying may not be Bagwell’s fault. By “making it plain,” Bagwell and company must forgo the necessarily speculative exercise of probing Malcolm’s psyche. Why was he in such inner turmoil? Why did he seem forever at a crossroads? What accounted for his self-destructive streak? What was the true root of his unyielding, righteous anger? One biographer, Bruce Perry, has hypothesized that though Malcolm X blamed his discontent on white society, the larger culprit was “his loveless, conflict-ridden” childhood. Bagwell does not seriously explore such questions, even as he hints at the man’s profound complexity.
He uses footage, for instance, from a debate at Oxford University at which Malcolm approvingly quotes from Hamlet’s famous soliloquy: is it better “to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them”? Malcolm interpreted the words as an exhortation to struggle against oppression; but as he well knew, they were really voiced as a contemplation of suicide.
Bagwell, playing it straight, does not highlight the irony, leaving us to make what we will of Malcolm’s literary allusions– and of Malcolm himself.
