The color of money

Screenwriter Jacob Epstein's scathing, gloves-off depiction of vicious partisan politics and Ernest Dickerson's pressure-cooker direction are as provocative and alive as Mayer and Abramson's book (subtitled "The Selling of Clarence Thomas") was dryly reportorial. The movie is undeniably pro-Anita Hill. But it manages to find some sympathy for Thomas, portraying him as a man who had no idea how much his privacy would be invaded when he was drafted by Bush to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by Thurgood Marshall and sent to the front line of the right's war on Roe vs. Wade and affirmative action. Interweaving actual TV footage of Thomas's contentious confirmation hearings with depictions of the back-room intrigue by which the conservatives finally prevailed, "Strange Justice" takes dead aim at hypocrites and fools of every political and ideological stripe. "Bulworth" and "Wag the Dog" are lightweights compared to this.

It's easy to imagine Murdoch's and Turner's jaws dropping when they saw Dickerson and Epstein's surreal, highly stylized take on the confirmation hearings. For example, before Thomas (played by square-jawed Spike Lee regular Delroy Lindo) takes the Senate floor, we see him praying in a bathroom with his born-again wife, Virginia, and his conservative sponsor, Sen. John Danforth; then the three stride in slow motion down the hallway while "Onward Christian Soldiers" swells on the soundtrack. (Weird as this scene is, it's documented in the book -- Danforth played "Onward Christian Soldiers" on a boombox in the bathroom during their prayer circle.)

Later, during the hearings, Dickerson and Epstein transform Thomas and Hill into the martyrs their respective supporters believe them to be. Answering Hill's explicit accusations that he sexually harassed her while he was her boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Thomas sits before the Judiciary Committee bathed in a stark white spotlight that glints off his glasses and reduces the senators to faceless silhouettes. His arms resting on the table in front of him, shirtsleeves rolled up and palms facing upward, Thomas seems poised to receive a lethal injection. When Thomas finally loses his cool and condemns the proceedings as a "high-tech lynching," Dickerson has Lindo strip off his shirt and deliver the speech bare-chested, with his tie knotted around his neck like a noose.

And while we remember attorney Hill (Regina Taylor, from "I'll Fly Away") sitting calmly before the committee in her prim turquoise dress, her dignified demeanor never cracking even when reciting the skankier details of Thomas's alleged harassment, Dickerson has her standing up to toy with a can of soda, dropping her voice low to imitate Thomas asking, "Who put this pubic hair on my Coke?." Then she breaks into eerie cackles. Who's the witch in this witch hunt?

Yeah, "Strange Justice" is surreal. But that's the point -- the actual events were surreal. A president indebted to the far right nominates an anti-affirmative-action black to the Supreme Court, then sits back and watches liberals squirm; a creepy Washington spinmeister (Kenneth Duberstein, played in the movie by Mandy Patinkin) is employed to drive the nomination through, by whatever means necessary; Thomas's taste in porno movies -- Long Dong Silver -- is paraded before a national TV audience; esteemed male senators overheat their imaginations painting Hill in florid soap opera terms as a crazy woman scorned. The book's carefully unruffled prose made these events seem humdrum, even as you couldn't believe what you were reading. But in its sometimes outlandish, in-your-face way, the movie forces us to stop and say, "Wait a minute -- this is crazy!"

Except for their fanciful testimony scenes, Taylor and Lindo play it pretty straight as Hill and Thomas. Both give splendidly nuanced performances that suggest how pained both of these proud, self-made successes were to be airing their dirty laundry in public. The movie makes it clear that both Hill and Thomas were people with beliefs who were used by people with agendas.

If "Strange Justice" fails to convey the depth of the rift the hearings opened up across the country between men and women and, particularly, between black women and white women, it still vividly reminds us how ugly politics can be, especially when civilians get caught in the crossfire. Take the movie's footage (please) of Republican committee members Alan Simpson and Orrin Hatch exercising their rancid misogyny, while Democrats Joseph Biden and Edward Kennedy remain too ignobly worried about saving their own political asses to defend Hill. If your blood boiled watching the hearings in 1991, it'll boil all over again watching "Strange Justice."

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