'Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches' review: Powerful words come to life

WHAT IT'S ABOUT This hourlong film about 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass is based on David W. Blight's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 biography and produced by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Along with readings from Douglass' three autobiographies by André Holland ("Passing"), this also features performances based on portions of speeches that Douglass gave over his lifetime, by Nicole Beharie, Colman Domingo, Jonathan Majors, Denzel Whitaker and Jeffrey Wright.

Those speeches are, in order: "I Have Come to Tell You Something About Slavery" from 1841 (Whitaker); "Country, Conscience, and the Anti-Slavery Cause," from 1847 (Majors); "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July" from 1852 (Beharie); "The Proclamation and a Negro Army," from 1863 (Domingo); and "Lessons of the Hour," from 1894, or the year before Douglass' death (Wright).

MY SAY Blight called his life of Douglass "the biography of a voice'' but this short film is essentially that biography in five voices, or really six, including Holland's. With the exception of Whitaker and maybe Beharie — who appeared alongside Wright in the 2010 Lincoln Center production of John Guare's "A Free Man of Color" — they each have extensive stage backgrounds, and their voices know how to play to "the house" (and do). They also know how to hold the screen (and do that too). Majors is all fire and thunder, while Wright is coolly reserved, almost resigned. Domingo is pure passion masquerading as pure reason. Whitaker begins with ironic detachment while Beharie begins diffidently. Those are oratorical feints before the real fireworks arrive.

Douglass was the single most photographed person of the 19th century, but that singular voice was lost to time, so interpretations or performances like these must suffice. There have been countless readings over the years, including one by the teenage descendants of Douglass, who were assembled by NPR in 2020 to read the 1852 4th of July speech. That was charming. These interpretations seem just about right.

As Blight explains in his Douglass biography, his subject was a writer and orator of genius who said what he meant and meant what he said. Those words, or at least the carefully chosen ones here, still roll like thunder across the years and still strike like lightning. They haven't lost their power to move or infuriate because the "moment you read" them, says Domingo, "you think they were written yesterday."

In fact, these A-listers clearly didn't sign up to participate in some airless history lesson. Their short, sharp performances have the sting of rebuke and the inescapable sense that Douglass wasn't just speaking to his present moment but to some distant future — ours perhaps?

Douglass lived long enough to witness the emerging horror of Jim Crow. Drawing here from Wright's reading, he wrote that "when the moral sense of a nation begins to decline, and the wheel of progress to roll backward, there's no telling how low one may fall or where the other may stop."

Douglass and his 21st century muse then hold aloft this flickering candle: "Would I be heard by this great nation, I would call to mind the sublime and glorious truths with which at its birth it saluted a listening world." Would that it.

BOTTOM LINE Douglass comes to life, or those words vividly do.