When We Were Kings

  Viewed September 4, 1999 on NBC

When We Were Kings showered me with the feeling of the 70s and Afro-American pride: the funky hairdos, the boisterous speeches of love and a great future for all Africans, that don't ring so true today. I value the film more as a document -- a miracle of a time capsule -- than as great filmmaking. It feels as if a lot of footage that was shot unmethodically over the month that Ali, Foreman, Don King and a host of others sweated in the Zairean jungle. This footage was preserved as best as possible (over a 23 year period, as I am told) while Leon Gast suffered for the funding to piece it into a film. His troubles earned him an Oscar, and we are privileged to see Ali in his prime -- and his image, never static, seems to beam from the screen (I've seen this movie previously in the theater, and there's little lost on video). Whether talking emphatically about the music of the world, or shadow boxing with a bunch of Zairean kids, Muhummad Ali exudes, well, Muhummad Ali. It's impossible to take your eyes off him. It also seems difficult for the filmmaker to get deeper beyond the surface level of this character who is extroverted like no other of this century, and whose icon status, as this film would have us believe, has been chiseled into a form that transcends circumspection.

I think my amazement after the first time I watched this movie was due largely to a lifetime of seeing Ali on TV as being anything less than articulate; his mumbling TV promo for D-Con Roach Spray more effectively advertised the brain-damaging effects of boxing.  In this decade, however, we know that Parkinson’s disease is the cause of his demise both in motor and verbal ability, and now we revere him as a symbol of human physical superiority succumb to its own weaknesses.  Watching footage of a young, brash athlete, a Black role model with remarkable verbal gifts, was a revelation, and I left the theater feeling exhilarated and a little mournful about this amazing human being.

During the second viewing, the impact of seeing this Ali for the first time gives way to other issues.  I paid more notice to the unqualified praise that virtually every interviewee lauds on Ali, not only as an athlete but as a political figure and black role model.  It lent itself as a point of contention, all of this praise; didn’t anyone have a beef with Ali?  Even Norman Mailer and George Plimpton are left in awe of the man, unable to penetrate his veneer of charisma.

Perhaps there is really nothing more to Ali than what we see of him both in and out of the ring: exuberant, opinionated, relentlessly public.  But that’s not likely.  We’re left with a glorious, festive testament to an animated icon of a man, a film as vibrant and wanting in insight as another biopic I saw this weekend.

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