‘Strange Justice’: Getting at Ugly Truth

A loud boom arrives Sunday. It’s Showtime’s Emmy warning shot across the bow of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

A flashback to 1991, the magnetic new movie is “Strange Justice,” more evidence that world-class HBO and fast-rising Showtime just about own the franchise when it comes to important, topical dramas on TV.

How important and topical? Think back eight years to the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill show, the most tense and captivating political telecast in years. Remember?

They were reprehensibly self-serving. They lied. They distorted. They misrepresented. They evaded. They dissembled. They tap-danced. They sidestepped. They pirouetted nimbly out of reach. They postured. So much so, in fact, that it was impossible to know who was telling the truth.

And those were just the senators.

Whether the smarmy Joseph R. Biden (D-Del.) or the babbling Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) or the incredibly shrinking Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) or the histrionic Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) or the nasty Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.), this chapter of Americana was as infuriating as it was enthralling.

When it came to theater, African Americans Thomas and Hill were hardly chumps themselves, their testimony before the camera and a panel of white male inquisitors splitting the nation over which was being truthful about her charges that he had sexually harassed her in a lewd manner.

You searched their faces for clues to their believability. She blanched. He twitched. She choked up. He cried. What did it all mean?

Ugly stereotypes traveled across the airwaves along with the shrill din of politics. As Thomas famously decried this “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” again an African American male was being defined by his alleged sexual proclivity. And the University of Oklahoma law professor who had emerged from anonymity to attack him was widely impugned as a puppet of the left and victim of her own alleged sexual fantasies.

No wonder these gory Senate Judiciary Committee wars--fought over President Bush’s ultra-conservative nominee to succeed retiring civil rights pioneer Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court--were TV’s government hearings of the century.

Discounting the Army-McCarthy hearings, the Watergate hearings and the Iran-contra hearings, of course. And most recently, the Clinton impeachment hearings, which made Hill’s shocking charges against her former boss Thomas (coming in “extremely graphic testimony you may not want your children to watch,” Dan Rather then warned CBS viewers) seem almost quaint.

Yet the Thomas-Hill duel itself was a distinctively grim and polarizing national TV spectacle that set off whites vs. whites, whites vs. blacks, blacks vs. blacks and males vs. females. Convoluted reasoning too often overtook logic, with some of Thomas’ defenders labeling Hill’s motives racist, even though she also was black.

Deep inside the twisty warrens of Capitol Hill, meanwhile, Machiavellian strategies were plotted, as both sides grappled for prime time and public opinion while staging a great pantheon of bluster every bit as rank as President Clinton and partisan demagogues haggling over his adventures with Monica Lewinsky. Preceding that impeachment epic by years, Thomas-Hill was a foreshadowing that exposed the warty underbelly of a congressional process that in this case was nourished less by democratic ideals than by cynical, secret deal-making.

Now this TV court of mixed messages again convenes indelibly, this time under the hot, revealing lights of “Strange Justice,” an emotionally raw, boldly stylish movie that convicts that process of malfeasance while staying neutral on the testimony and integrity of Hill and Thomas, even though one of them had to be either fibbing under oath or delusional.

The brawny, deeply troubling Showtime account is based on the book “Strange Justice,” by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. Instead of Hill, this time it’s Regina Taylor, so perfectly cast as Thomas’ subdued accuser that her work here for director Ernest Dickerson and executive producer-screenwriter Jacob Epstein is positively eerie. And instead of stubby Thomas, it’s towering Delroy Lindo, so convincing and seethingly on point as the outraged, soon-to-be-narrowly confirmed 106th justice that the physical mismatch falls away.

“Strange Justice” is a sort of trilogy in one that begins with the campaign to sell nominee Thomas to the Senate and the public, a task entrusted by the Bush crowd to Kenneth Duberstein (ably played by Mandy Patinkin), the seasoned GOP operative who had been White House chief of staff under Ronald Reagan.

Deploying textbook political spin, he plans to outflank liberals and other Thomas opponents by defining him before they do. In other words: “Block their message, get ours out, while making it look like none of it comes from the White House.”

The strategy shifts to defense once Hill reluctantly comes forward with her surprise accusations about Thomas, a former chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, after being urged by friends to do so “if he did everything to you that you say he did.”

Ultimately the Thomasians outmaneuver their foes, affirming that he who speaks last and in front of more viewers--in addition to his stirring opening remarks, the nominee is granted time to powerfully rebut Hill’s persuasively damning testimony--usually carries the day.

“Strange Justice” has Thomas willing to fudge facts to get nominated, when coached by Duberstein, for example, to camouflage his reputed anti-abortion views by obfuscating on Roe vs. Wade. “Your opinion is that you haven’t formed an opinion.” Abortion rightists were incredulous when that became his testimony. Epstein’s script also does not deflect charges that the nomination of Thomas, a relatively obscure appellate court judge, was driven by radical right politics, not his judicial writings. They were virtually nonexistent, and thus, crows a pleased Duberstein here, “less to defend.”

Yet the movie endorses neither Hill’s sexual harassment charges against Thomas nor the accusations against her, and in fact depicts each as apparent earnest straight arrows. Never more so than in Dickerson’s charged replays of their speeches to the Judiciary Committee, which keep to the text while magnifying their emotions with clearly surreal, invented material filmed in tight close-ups and theatrical silhouettes. It’s stagy but effective, and so obvious a dramatic device that even amnesiacs aren’t likely to regard these scenes as entirely factual.

During this period, for example, the Hill seen on TV was a composed stoic who mostly bottled her feelings in front of the committee. But after starting calmly about Thomas, Taylor’s Hill soon loses it, and tears streak her cheeks as she shouts, “I told him I did not want to talk about these things!” And she punctuates her memory of his alleged smutty reference to a soft drink can by standing and holding a glass of water.

Lindo is jacket-less in the last of two appearances before the committee as Thomas, moreover, his sleeves rolled to the elbow as he approaches within arm’s length of the senators, emotions aflame when removing his shirt, throwing it to the ground and saying “no job is worth” what he’s had to endure. And when mentioning “high-tech lynching,” he lifts his necktie like a noose.

Cut to Duberstein: “Bull’s-eye.”

As is Dickerson’s cross-cutting of footage of real committee members with their actor counterparts, a row of stony white guys whose uniformity behind their microphones symbolizes the nation’s historic gender and color imbalance in not only the highest realms of government but in all corridors of power. It was history repeating itself: men judging a woman, whites judging blacks.

“Strange Justice” vividly recalls Hill’s virtual abandonment by Democrats on the committee for reasons that included a fear of being seen as resisting a nominee because he was black. Hill to a supporter: “What I’m hearing [is] expect nothing from the Democrats because they can’t afford to look partisan. The Republicans are foaming to get at me. Who’s on our side?”

Not the publicly unctuous Biden, certainly, nor the curiously mum Kennedy, unable to hurdle his own checkered past to aggressively help the besieged Hill. Nor was it the now-retired Simpson, a two-faced Republican who had the gall to protest political cynicism the day after claiming on TV to be getting calls and letters about Hill from Oklahoma saying, “Watch out for this woman.” On a talk show the next morning, he refused to provide details, saying, in effect, anything goes in politics.

Including lying, which as the Thomas-Hill hearings stressed, Americans appear to view as part of life’s indigenous furniture, having become either cynical about it or desensitized to it, possibly through TV.

Thomas, who for all we know may have been duplicitous himself, angrily protests to the committee in Showtime’s movie: “This is not America. . . . “

Isn’t it?

* “Strange Justice” can be seen Sunday at 8 p.m. on Showtime. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).

*

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached via e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.