Something to watch tonight: Friday 5 January

Glory (Zwick, 1989)

Firstly, no “Friday new releases” post today. Reviews of all the latest films in cinemas and stream­ing are going to be pos­ted to RNZ for the next few weeks (until At the Movies returns) and I’ll sum­mar­ise them here once they’ve been up for a few days.

So, an old fash­ioned stream­ing recom­mend­a­tion today: Ed Zwick’s double Oscar-winner Glory from 1989.

Just before Christmas I was read­ing this lovely memori­al to the great act­or Andre Braugher who passed away from lung can­cer earli­er in December at the much-too-early age of 65: Listening to Andre Braugher When he acted, the words were notes; the sen­tences, lyr­ics; every mono­logue, an aria. In the piece Matt Zoller Seitz spe­cific­ally men­tions Braugher’s debut fea­ture film per­form­ance in Glory and I was forced to con­front the fact that I either hadn’t seen the film when I thought I had, or hadn’t remembered Braugher’s participation.

Handily then, Netflix announced earli­er this week that the film had been added to their ser­vice in New Zealand so I caught up with it (again*) last night.

Braugher plays Thomas Searles Jr., a second gen­er­a­tion free man and child­hood friend of Matthew Broderick’s mil­quetoast Colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, who would lead the first regi­ment of Black sol­diers to fight for the Union in the Civil War. As an edu­cated and priv­ileged young man, Thomas finds army life hard – Denzel Washington’s rebel­li­ous Trip nick­names him “Snowflake” – but by the end his jour­ney has been as import­ant to the film as every­one else’s.

Glory remains a tre­mend­ously power­ful achieve­ment, the Black per­formers (includ­ing Washington, Morgan Freeman and Jihmi Kennedy) eat­ing up the mater­i­al and leav­ing per­fectly fine act­ors like Broderick and Cary Elwes look­ing bland and inef­fect­ive. Which – until the final fate­ful assault on Charleston’s Fort Wagner – they were.

Washington won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor that year and you can see how big a star he is going to become. A couple of weeks ago, dir­ect­or Ed Zwick took to the social media plat­form formerly known as Twitter to remin­isce about Glory and described Washington thusly:

While work­ing, he burned with an incho­ate rage, con­trolled yet always just below the sur­face and access­ible at any moment. I learned not to break his con­cen­tra­tion between takes. Off set, he was funny and approach­able. Better that than the oth­er way around, I figured.

*I must have seen it before! Some of it is very famil­i­ar but oth­er scenes felt com­pletely new to me. One thing that might be import­ant to note is that the 5.1 audio seems to be have been mastered very quietly and we had to turn the volume up much high­er than usu­al to appre­ci­ate it.

Where to watch Glory

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Streaming on Netflix

Australia: Digital rent­al from Apple/Amazon/Microsoft

USA: Digital rental

UK: Streaming on Prime Video