The life and achievements of Shirley Chisholm, the groundbreaking Black politician, are told in a formulaic drama that boasts a winning central performance
For all its broad strokes, Shirley, the new Netflix biopic on trailblazing politician and erstwhile presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm, has a point. Some things are not subtle. The film opens with a visualizer of the House of Representatives in 1968: of the 435 members, only 11 were women, only five Black, and no Black women. Or to put it more starkly: in the official congressional class portrait on the steps of the Capitol, Chisholm (Regina King) is the only Black female face in a sea of grizzled white male visages. The Capitol dome in the background may look obviously CGI-ed, but the image is effective: Chisholm’s mere appearance in the halls of power was radical, her fight steeply uphill.
Said image is also fitting for Shirley, written and directed by John Ridley, which is insightful on Chisholm’s underappreciated significance as the first Black woman to run for president, even if it spells out the story of her groundbreaking 1972 campaign in block letters. For shortly after that portrait, King’s Shirley, speaking with what I have to assume is an accurately light West Indian lilt, proves her mettle in obvious terms by telling off an old white senator who mocks her equal paycheck and demanding a better committee assignment from the speaker of the House, after the freshman rep from Brooklyn gets stuck with agriculture. (Chisholm, neé St Hill, was raised between Bed-Stuy and Barbados, though her pre-politics background is so sparingly and choppily conveyed that you’ll have to consult Wikipedia.)
