The conceit sounds like a liberal-guilt gimmick—a documentary
about homeless people reciting speeches by Chief Sealth, Bobby Kennedy,
Sojourner Truth, et al. But Stranger Genius Award–winning
director Linas Phillips steers clear of didacticism and portrays his
subjects as they are: partly victims of circumstance (child abuse,
mental illness), partly victims of themselves (they’re all addicted to
drink or crack or both).

But deep down, Great Speeches is less a movie about
homelessness than a movie about language—its subjects’ hard-luck
stories aren’t ends in themselves, but a means to understanding the
speeches. A homeless Native American, who spun into alcoholism after
the death of his infant, recites Chief Sealth’s 1854 speech and could
be talking about the drunk Native Americans haunting the docks and
Pioneer Square: “When the last Red Man shall have perished, and the
memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these
shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe.”

A guy who has attempted suicide (and failed) seven times recites
Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech from a hospital bed: “The dread of
something after death/The undiscover’d country from whose bourn/No
traveller returns, puzzles the will/And makes us rather bear those ills
we have/Than fly to others that we know not of.”

A female crack addict who sleeps in a wheelchair in a parking
garage, where she’s been severely assaulted several times, recites
Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?”: “That man over there says that
women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to
have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or
over mud puddles, or gives me any best place!”

The human degradation in Great Speeches can be difficult to
watch, but it’s a bracing reminder that these speeches articulate, in
an immediate and visceral way, the experiences of living people in
desperate circumstances. It strips away the crust of history and
sterility from the words, making them unsettling—and
dangerous—all over again. recommended

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

3 replies on “On Screen”

  1. I saw it at SIFF earlier this year and absolutely loved it. This film is a tribute to the hard, ignored, and marginalized lives of the urban poor in our city. With the economy in shambles, the film is even more timely and poignant.

  2. I’m pretty sure Chief Sealth(?)’s speech (I always called him Chief Seattle) is widely recognized as a fraud written years later by a white guy, but whatever….

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