MLK/FBI (2020, Sam Pollard) (Patreon)

48/100

Tries to go the Kapadia route by keeping its talking heads offscreen (until the last few minutes), but that doesn't significantly mitigate the extent to which this largely feels like David Garrow synopsizing his 1981 book at length, accompanied by archival footage and supplemented by a few stray thoughts about the salacious, as yet unconfirmed details that have since partially emerged. While a few other voices are heard—ranging from additional academics to men who knew and worked alongside King—Pollard, for some reason, declines to identify any of them (again, until the last few minutes), repeatedly putting their names onscreen* without telling us who they are or why, in the academics' case, their assertions should carry any weight. A strange, ineffective choice that I can't imagine was meant to serve as a deliberate echo of FBI wiretapping, which can itself result in murky attribution. Obviously there's a lot of compelling King footage here, but the film leans heavily on well-known aspects of Hoover's persecution, never digging any deeper; I waited in vain for some elderly reporter to explain why no paper ran with the juicy scoop they were all apparently offered. The thorny question of journalistic ethics briefly raised at the outset—should one be complicit in what amounted to governmental terrorism if doing so reveals the truth?—barely gets mentioned thereafter. And why repeatedly allude to King's sexual indiscretions while never once even mentioning Clyde Tolson? Can't be for legal reasons—Eastwood made a whole fucking deeply mediocre movie about that! I seem to be talking myself into an even lower opinion, so let's leave it there lest I have to shave another half-star off of my rating. 

* Though I couldn't help but clock the one chickenshit exception: No name appears when Andrew Young (pretty sure it's his voice) says that he doesn't believe James Earl Ray had anything to do with King's assassination. Why include the remark at all if it's too embarrassing to attribute? So many bizarre decisions here.