Review: The Best of Enemies Turns Racial Conciliation into Hollywood Pablum

Robin Bissel’s film may be based on a true story, but it more accurately resembles an all-too-familiar Hollywood tall tale.

The Best of Enemies
Photo: STX Entertainment

Early into writer-director Robin Bissel’s The Best of Enemies, Durham native C.P. Ellis (Sam Rockwell) meets in secret with two city councilmen, Carvie Oldham (Bruce McGill) and Garland Keith (Nick Searcy), who are also members of the white supremacist network known as the White Citizens Council. The conniving politicians, who must keep the appearance of impartiality in public, need a man to do their dirty work, and Ellis, leader of his city’s branch of the KKK, makes no bones about rounding up his racist buddies and flooding the following day’s council meeting as a show of support for a slumlord who regularly evicted his black tenants and neglected their concerns.

Through 1971, Ellis had made a regular practice of denying African-Americans their humanity, be it through organized protests or under threat of violence. But we’re given only the briefest glimpse into how he oppressed Durham’s poor black population before the film moves on to invite our pity for the man as he shuffles off to the mental hospital where he visits and tenderly cares for his mentally disabled son. In case it wasn’t self-evident, even white supremacists have their own heavy burdens to carry. Humanizing a monster is one thing, but The Best of Enemies goes out of its way to virtually apologize for Ellis’s indiscretions, all but brushing off his involvement with the Klan by repeatedly suggesting that it stemmed more from a desire to belong than a true hatred of anyone who wasn’t white.

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Except that Ellis wasn’t some part-time terrorist, becoming at one point the Exalted Cyclops of Durham’s KKK group. But the film doesn’t care to give us a sense of the deep, long-lasting harm the man’s actions caused Durham’s black community, as it’s too busy softening the man’s image out of the gate. It’s in surrounding him with Klan members, such as Floyd (Wes Bentley) and Wiley (Nicholas Logan), whose tactics are shown to be violent and especially nefarious, and in double-underlining how his kindly wife, Mary (Anne Heche), shows no signs of prejudice and treats Ellis’s Klan activities as if they’re part of some misguided phase.

Of course, putting a human face on a Klan leader is part and parcel of the film’s endgame, which becomes clearer once Ellis is thrust into a close working relationship with Durham’s fiercest civil rights activist, Ann Atwater (Taraji P. Henson), after the town’s segregated black school is burned down. As the two foes co-chair the town’s charrette—a community meeting convened to bring opposing sides together to negotiate how to deal with the displaced black students, including an option to fully integrate the city’s schools—The Best of Enemies casually sidesteps all notions of institutionalized racism to instead focus on the character arc of one well-known white supremacist as he finally gets close to his enemies.

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The Best of Enemies quaintly believes that racial conciliation is achieved by confronting racism, one racist at a time. Throughout, Ellis and Atwater’s odd-couple antics play out in mostly predictable ways, with the latter chipping away at the former’s harsh exterior until he’s become a bona fide white savior. And through much of the film, Bissel conveys this drama with a weirdly light-hearted touch—all the better to grab the audience by the time the ostensibly inspirational finale rolls around. The Best of Enemies may be based on a true story, but in so stubbornly turning the spotlight away from Atwater and the radical, grind-it-out community activism that took on the racism that Ellis helped to foster as a segregationist, it more accurately resembles an all-too-familiar Hollywood tall tale.

Score: 
 Cast: Taraji P. Henson, Sam Rockwell, Babou Ceesay, Nick Searcy, Wes Bentley, Anne Heche, Bruce McGill, John Gallagher Jr., Nicholas Logan, Gilbert Glenn Brown, Caitlin Mehner  Director: Robin Bissel  Screenwriter: Robin Bissel  Distributor: STX Entertainment  Running Time: 132 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2019  Buy: Video

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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