I wanted to see the biopic Talk to Me because Don Cheadle is in it. I had never heard of the Washington DC DJ he played Petey Greene. He was a loud mouth, in-your-face, ex-con who talked his way into becoming a radio DJ in the 1960s.
Cheadle was good but the character didn't really have any form of arc. Perhaps true to life, Greene stayed the same throughout his career. Chiwetel Ejiofor played Dewey Hughes, first Greene's boss and then after seeing something special in him, his manager. Their two stories are intertwined as Hughes pushes Greene into standup comedy and then television. The problem is that Greene isn't that comfortable doing these things and eventually the two have it out and split.
I actually think the film should have ended there, it was a very dramatic moment. Instead it goes on a bit longer but focuses on Hughes' story. The fact that Hughes' real-life son was a co-writer might have something to do with that. Given Greene's apparent lack of real-life change this was perhaps a good dramatic decision, but it still feels off.
Apparently Greene grabbed his audience like few others before him. There are some early scenes of him on the air but it didn't feel like there was enough. He famously was on the air the night of Dr. Martin Luther King's death and did a lot to calm the riots. But the film didn't show enough of this. it showed that people reacted well to him but didn't give us enough to discover this on our own.
So good film not great. Definitely some good performances but needed a tighter more focused script.
3 comments:
That's because the story begins and ends with Dewey. It's Dewey's story (even though Petey is the dynamic one. Think of "Rainman". Tom Cruise changes, not Dustin Hoffman. Dewey changes, not Petey.
I'm not sure Dewey went through much of a change, at least not that we saw. After he broke with Dewey he bought the radio station with his wife Cathy who went on found Radio One. We don't even see Cathy in the film. Dewey moved to California and was successful. There seems to be a lot there that the movie skipped.
In Talk to Me we get the line twice that Petey needed Dewey to do what he was afraid to do and Dewey needed Petey to say what he was afraid to say, but I'm not sure we saw that to be true. Dewey said to his boss not what Petey was saying but what Dewey wanted to happen (hire Petey). They certainly didn't communicate much with each other.
Dewey stayed driven to succeed and he held a grudge against Petey for years, until Petey's girlfriend came and said things were bad. They reconciled but it seemed superficial. Time may have healed the wound, but I think if they had stayed together it would have been just as bad as before. There's one scene of Dewey crying with his incarcerated brother that suggests they had reconciled some how but that's conjecture.
Agreed,quite a bit missing in this story. But one thing this movie did was prove, yet again, how skilled an actorCheadle is.
And onethingthis comment provesishowbroken thespacebaronmykeyboard is.
A moviewell worth seeing however.
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