Chadwick Boseman Borrowed from an Icon then became one himself.

I remember the first time I really really watched a Chadwick Boseman film. The film was "42", a film that I saw get decent reviews but from the trailer had turned me almost completely off. I'm not a particular fan of biopics, lesser so in the recent era since Taylor Hackford's "Ray" feat Jamie Foxx. I kind of mark that film as the beginning of what would be a downward spiral for biopics. Less truth, more catering to estates and public lionization, as well as a lot of straightforward uninteresting storytelling approaches. 42, directed in a very workmanlike way by a very workmanlike Brian Helgeland (who with respect did direct a very respectable remake of Point Blank in "Paybakc") seemed like just another in a line of mediocre autobiographical films that seemed unsure of what or how to tell these stories any longer, and at current movie prices I can’t afford the risk...for the record I was right, but one thing came out of it...Chadwick Boseman was legit.

When I think about Chad a number of things come up, but funny enough Black Panther is not first, legendary as it already is.. No, I think about the dance scenes in Tate Taylor's "Get on Up", and how the performance is so much of why the movie works. I think of how like any good actor Boseman seems more focused on the essence than the steps, not in that he didn't do them extremely well, but that the spirit, the quality of what drove the steps was MORE important. I'm thinking the scene where he argues with his band about the music. How precise his movements were; a wave of the hand, the arms barely leaving his side, his temper clearly raised, but never flexed in his face, the only give away being a tight glare. It works much like the way he captures James voice. There’s a clenched feeling to James Voice, a feeling that the vocal chords are not truly free, thus the wonderful breaking you would hear in songs like "The Big Payback". Boseman seemed to allow his physicality as Brown to stem forth from this tightness, that eventually gives way to marvelous explosions. It’s the kind of brilliant work and informed ingenious that gave power to Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles and Denzel as Malcom , it's much less about pure mimicry and much more about pure soul

That second name is important because it is a quality of Denzel Washington's I most respected in Chad. Outside of maybe his walk and his smile one of the main things Denzel Washington may be recognized for as an actor is his ability to make very average movies look good or be good. Chadwick had his own megawatt smile, and his own trademark swag, (on full display in the now iconic walk back onto the battlefield in “Black Panther”) but most importantly he had, and maybe borrowed somewhat - the same ability to make lesser material feel that much more entertaining…

This is the quality that leads people to say there is no bad Denzel movie. It's a very very rare quality in actors, that starts with the fact that the actor doesn't give a bad performance. This is an incredibly difficult thing to accomplish even in a barely over double digits film career like Chadwicks. It's a combination of picking your scripts well as they pertain to your abilities, ( not just their quality) knowing your wheelhouse, having an almost unholy quality of and more importantly consistency of personality, magnetism, charisma, and of course of technique, and work ethic. To keep yourself focused and consistent even when you can see or feel the material is a bore or boorish is no small feat, and even some of our greatest Brando, DeNiro, DDL ( “Nine” anyone? ) can appear disinterested or disengaged from the work.. not these two, or maybe they are and we just can’t tell. There's an effortlessness to their talent of the same type that kept folk underrating Redford and Newman for YEARS. For Boseman, there's an ever present intensity in his work that reminds me of Laurence Olivier, Montegomery Clift, and even at times a young DeNiro round the eyes. Theres a physicality that matches two of my favorite action heroes of all time; Tom Cruise and Keanu Reeves. You don’t have to look hard to see all of this in Brian Kirk's extremely underrated "21 Bridges". The physicality I spoke of is in a harrowing chase scene with Stephen James that becomes all that more amazing when you realize what he was dealing with while performing these amazing stunts. The intensity, well, from basically the opening of the movie to the end, and finally the effortlessness in the final scene with the great J.K. Simmons. If you're not watching closely it appears as if Boseman is barely even trying, as if he's just standing there delivering lines, and yet he's giving each one a special purpose, special meaning. He carries some, let's others go, quantifies, enlarges another. He glares, he pauses, he ponders. But all of that is what I grasp by watching the scene intensely, when I first watched it all I knew is that I felt everything the scene was intended to do and I felt the power of both of these actors reacting and bouncing off each other even though Simmons was holding a lot of the more obvious power of the scene - for reasons I couldn't describe before focusing to watch and find the "why" - I felt Chad was Simmons equal the whole way through even while his dialogue, and character is not the level of inherently interesting that Simmons is...

This energy, this broad appeal is the reason why Chadwick could be every bit as appealing in films like "The Express" or "Message to the King", (which maybe don't hold up to the level of talent that he has) as he was in Black Panther, or Spike Lee's "Da 5 Bloods". That exact same type of energy that allowed Denzel to be (at his age) running and carrying a string of sub-par action films that were basically upheld by his inescapable charm. Films that could have likely ended up as pure duds without him. Out of time, Unstoppable, a remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, Fallen, DeJavu, 2 Guns these are films that run the gambit from “having a quality of their own, but nowhere near the kind of quality they would reach with Denzel”, to “outright bad ideas that became confoundedly tolerable due to Denzel's existence in them”. This is exactly the quality that to me Chadwick Boseman was exhibiting in films that he was in. Before anyone can say that anyone was able to, or going to hold that mantle that Denzel had you would have to first show me that they could be this interesting in and hold up movies of this kind of quality. It is also one of the major reasons why I will miss Chadwick Boseman so much. In a certain way this leads to something that he also shares in common with Denzel Washington. It's a surprising thing (and maybe even something that points to race) that Denzel Washington over his entire career never really got to work with a (white) director that had an equal quality to himself. When considering the most revered and most known directors we have to date you could say the one name that reaches the top of the list is Ridley Scott ( American Gangster) . But if we're interested in assigning directors tiers ( questionable I know) many of the directors that Washington worked with over his career were undoubtedly anywhere from second, to third and fourth tier directors, with names like Zemeckis (Flight) , and Ridley's brother Tony ( A slew that included Crimson Tide, and Man on Fire) at that top second tier, and names like Nick Cassavetes ( Out of Time) , an Gregory Hoblit (Fallen) at the bottom. Spike Lee and the underrated Carl Franklin are great directors, but again we know over Denzel's career era that black directors were hard to come by. For an actor of his talent it strikes me as somewhat insane that we never saw him work with the likes of Scorsese or Paul Thomas Anderson or Michael Mann, or Fincher ( Almost the case on Se7en) or Mendes. This sadly is also the case with a Chadwick Boseman who never got to work with a director of his quality over his entire career. This also strikes me as insane and very telling of how narrow the opportunities for black actors and actors of color still are in the industry.

That Boseman never got a chance to work with a Derek Cianfrance, a Denis Villeneuve, a Tomas Alfredsson, a Tarantino, or even an Robert Eggers, nevermind the black talent that's has just started to flex its muscles like Dee Rees, Ava DuVernay, Nia DeCosta, Barry Jenkins, or Jordan Peele, and now never will, truly carries sadness to my bones. Boseman had the greatest of his generation written all over him and it says plenty that it's still pretty hard to take that away from him considering the quality of the films that he did do. Black Panther is truly iconic and it's the one time that we saw Boseman be paired with a director in Ryan Coogler that put him in material that would lend to his blooming iconic abilities. The fact that Denzel was secretly paying for Bosemans schooling is now making its rounds around the internet, and I think to myself it’s obvious Boseman inherited more than just money from the acting legend. I take solace in knowing that there is not one Boseman movie that I couldn't pop on right now and watch from beginning to end (especially when you consider something like "Message to the King” be as completely Netflixy as a Netflix movie can be ) and enjoy it knowing that he put everything into everything that he did, and left us with the hope and the belief that the unthinkable whole that will be left whenever Denzel Washington leaves us may not ever be able to be replaced, but can and will be carried on, and that just like the ancestors he speaks to in Black Panther and the mantle of the Black Panther itself, he passes it on to the generation he birthed quite literally from the hand he recieved from Denzel. RIP Chad.