Race (2016)

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Race Movie Poster

Race is a biographical sports drama who released on February 11, 2016 (Toronto) and directed by Stephen Hopkins. Race sets itself up as a standard Hollywood biopic: a straightforward telling of the life story of Jesse Owens, the African American sprinter who made history when he won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics. It starring

Plot

This movie starts in 1933, just as Owens leaves his home in Cleveland to Ohio State University: he has a serious girlfriend, Ruth (Shanice Banton), as well as a young daughter, and he promises that he will soon be back with a wedding ring. It's not long until track-and-field coach Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis) notices Owens' gifts at the university, and it's just a few years away from the Olympic Games to be held in Berlin. But it is not clear if the United States will even participate: some observers in the States are pushing to boycott the games as word spreads of Hitler's ethnic-cleansing mission.

Stephan James as Jesse Owens

Avery Brundage (Jeremy Irons), Commissioner of Construction and President of the American Olympic Committee, travels to Berlin to check out the scene and meet with Nazis (among them propaganda honcho Joseph Goebbels, played, with cartoonishly glassy-eyed menace, by Barnaby Metschurat). After a handshake agreement that roughly translates into "Promise you're going to be cool about the Jews? "Brundage returns to the United States and reports to Jeremiah Mahoney (William Hurt), president of the Amateur Athletic Union and a strong supporter of the boycott, that the United States should send its athletes as planned.

Owens, of course, is ready to go, but he is also under pressure from various factions, including the NAACP, to vote out. In the end, he decides that it is better to challenge the Nazi obsession with racial purity than to withdraw from it, and that the four Olympic medals he wins on German soil, as Hitler looks frustrated, prove him right.

Pro

(left) The real Jason Owens and Stephan James

There's a scene where owen just ignored all the hatred for him and focused on what he's doing. In the end, the hatred of the football team softens into an insensitive crowd noise, and then into respectful silence. The movie depicts that no matter how hard the racism you faced, just ignore racism and racist attacks, and they'll go away, and leaving you to achieve your dreams in peace. [1]

Owens' story is an extraordinary tale about the athletic record-breaking achieved by a young African-American man during a time of racism and anti-Semitism.[2] -Odie Henderson on Rogerebert.com

"Owens overcomes an impoverished upbringing and racism to become the world’s leading athlete, with the help of his coach (Jason Sudeikis) and a burning desire to win"[3]

Controversy

"Owens was discriminated against in the US because he was black. But when he became a black athlete who embarrassed Hitler on his own turf, Owens was lauded as an American hero who helped the country gain the moral high ground as World War II neared". There's a scene where he's forced to take a freight elevator to the Waldorf Hotel reception in his honor, because racism doesn't let him access the front entrance. It shows how cruel someone or country can be just because someone has a black skin.[4]

Reference