Confirmation (2016)

Too much of everything

Excellent but underrated film

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

There's nothing terrible about Confirmation. The acting is decent, with persuasive performances. It puts out the basic facts, shows the Republican street-fight tactics that included a threat to introduce nonsensical, sleazy testimony from some Hill students, and portrays the Democrats as outgunned and, as is often the case, unwilling to pull out their own knife even after the Republicans draw blood.The problem is, it's all pretty boring. To some extent, that may be the result of the source material; neither Thomas nor Hill is a dynamic personality, and you're essentially faced with a he-said- she-said between two staid Republican lawyers.At the same time, the movie seems desperate to keep things dry and serious. Alan Simpson says some nutty things, but the actor says them as blandly as possible. Kinnear does a good job of imitating Biden, except his performance tosses out Biden's low-key humor in favor of midwestern blandness.Basically, any place where the movie has a choice between making things more dynamic or less dynamic, it chooses less dynamic, resulting in something that's actually sometimes less dramatic than watching the original hearings on youtube.Confirmation seems built for the classroom, where students can watch and discuss it. If you want to learn a little history, I'd say this is a palatable choice, but if you want to watch something enjoyable, give this a pass.

In 1991 President G. H. W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, an African-American, for a position on the Supreme Court. A young law professor who had worked with him, Anita Hill, testified in an investigation that he had sexually harassed her. The allegations most remember are probably Thomas' asking bout a pubic hair on his can of Pepsi and he referring to a character named Long Dong Silver that he'd seen in a porn movie. Legal entanglements abounded, dominated by public relations. Thomas was confirmed.The movie clearly takes the part of Anita Hill without storming the ramparts. She's shown as a quiet professor at the University of Oklahoma who was contacted by the press in a routine inquiry about Thomas' nomination. She told the reporter of her experiences after a promise that her name would never become public. The reporter made the entire incident public and the result was an investigation in which Thomas angrily declared that what was going on was nothing more than a "high tech lynching." At the time, it sounded plausible enough to me, but I thought, well, so what? I was more interested in his politics than his putting moves on some woman in the work place.His politics and his performance as a judge didn't measure up. The American Bar Association denied him its highest ranking of "well qualified." Thomas claimed that he'd never had a conversation or given any thought to the controversial Roe vs. Wade decision. And since his appointment he's been invariably conservative and since 1998 has asked only one question from the bench. He's probably the least of our nine -- or rather eight -- Supreme Court Justices.Yet he was confirmed by a narrow margin with bi-partisan votes. I was curious about the Dems who voted in his favor. Here are the states those Dems represented: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Virginia.It's too bad the movie makes such a pitiable suffering victim out of Anita Hill, although that's what she was. An attractive and intelligent black woman (Yale Law School) who may well have been subject to unwelcome and vulgar comments from her boss.Still, she's certainly not Mother Theresa or Roma Downey. In the film she comes across as a stereotype, the harassed, betrayed, victimized woman. And the actress, Kerry Washington, is believable but no more than that. She has little range. She's not particularly INTERESTING and when she shouts something in anger it sounds acted.As Clarence Thomas, Wendell Pierce is rather a blank coin. He denies everything. He's indignant. But he's even more of a cardboard cutout than Hill's character. His white wife, Alison Wright, stands staunchly by his side, showing no more animation than a figure in the President's Hall at Disney World.The only casting choice that stands out is that of the usually forgettable Greg Kinnear, who is Joe Biden, chairman of the committee. He looks a little like the younger Biden but his voice -- deliberately or not -- bears an uncanny resemblance to Biden's.Hill may be shown as put upon and Thomas as virtuous but if there is a man who clearly makes misjudgments, it's Joe Biden, who shuts down the inquiry before the witnesses have a chance to speak, and who does so because he's brow beaten into compliance by angry peers who want the whole blasted thing to disappear from the media because it's giving the Senate a bad rep.On the whole it's inoffensive and a little bland. I guess that's better than white hot agitprop.

The movie itself is a credible by-the-numbers presentation of the firestorm that was the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings from the early 1990's. Where the made for t.v. movie really shines is in its character portrayals.Anita Hill is shown as a martyr; Clarence Thomas is portrayed as a creep, but not a criminal; Senator Biden is played as a well meaning boob; Senator Simpson comes off as out of touch; Senator Dansforth seems loyal to a fault; and the presidential administration looks to not care if the charges leveled against their nominee are true or not.While not exactly covering any new ground, the film at least appears to give a fig leaf to not choosing a side (though it leans in favor of Anita Hill). It's not a hatchet job, which is something actually worthy of praise these days.All in all, it's a solid film, and doesn't try too hard to create its own narrative. Not a bad way to spend a couple of hours on a weekend.

Almost twenty-five years ago, Anita Hill testified in front of an all-white male congressional hearing presided over by Senator Joe Biden, accusing Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, a legal concept that did not, as yet, resonate with the American public. In "Confirmation", an HBO mini-series, we see the reliving of the riveting testimony: Anita Hill's accusations and Clarence Thomas's defense with almost exact wording from the hearing transcripts. At times the hearing seems to deal with race – particularly after Thomas's "high tech lynching" comment, which struck an emotional chord for some and a signal for others that Hill's testimony would be discounted. What "Confirmation" actually zeroes in on is how Anita Hill's world on the job was radically different from a male colleague's. Although sexual harassment had been defined as a form of sexual discrimination in 1977, almost fifteen years later the term "sexual harassment" was still not in the public conscience. The Anita Hill testimony changed that. Read the entire review at: www.unhealedwound.com