Shrunken ‘Violet’

Movies based on real-life events or people tend to sink or soar based on the level of dramatic imagination injected into the true story; that is the creative element that burnishes details and streamlines the narrative to reveal the complexities that make a story worth telling.

Think A Beautiful Mind or The Hurricane or even Rosewood on the high end of this spectrum. Unfortunately, American Violet, based on the true story of a young black woman who stands up to a corrupt and racist district attorney and in a small Texas town, falls at the other end.

The plot itself is a classic only-in-America (or, increasingly, only-in-Texas) piece of theater. In 2000, a 24-year-old mother of four finds herself caught up in a drug sweep orchestrated by the Robertson County district attorney, who deploys the local police like military commandos against the black residents of the county.

The woman, Dee Roberts, is arrested and learns that a single informant has identified her—and everyone else caught in the sweep—as a drug dealer. She faces a stiff sentence if she accepts an offer to plead guilty to the trumped-up charges. All around her, friends and neighbors—poverty-level, project-housing dwellers—are copping pleas to save themselves jail time, expense and further embarrassment.

But she refuses, and eventually the ACLU takes her case. The rest is history. While there are the elements of great drama here, they never translate to the screen.

Charles S. Dutton is on hand as the local minister, the moral fulcrum of the community. Alfre Woodard as a steely, bat-wielding grandmother is her usual useful self. Will Patton is fine as a local lawyer and former police officer, who finds the courage to join forces with the outsiders to challenge the status quo and call the DA to account. Michael O’Keefe is an adequate baddy as the racist DA.

But overall the performances are predictable and staid. (Tim Blake Nelson—oh, brother, where the hell are you?—mails it in as the lead ACLU attorney.) What saves the film from its own pedestrianism and straight-to-DVD fate is the performance of Nicole Beharie as Dee Roberts. Beharie is a revelation. If you blinked, you may have missed her as the main love interest in the biopic The Express: The Ernie Davis Story.

In American Violet you keep wanting more of her. She blows away the veterans. No disrespect, but they are only acting: She is Dee Roberts.

So handily does she inhabit the role that when she explains to her mother (Woodard) why she will not take a plea —“Didn’t you always say the truth will set you free!”—the explanation manages, somehow, not to come off as clichéd. But in the end, too many other things get in the way of her story.

How did such a bright woman come to have four kids by three different men by age 24? How and why would she put up with the father of two of them—played by the rapper/actor Xzibit as the deadbeat dad who lives in the same housing project? How does she support her family on a waitress’ meager earnings? All of the above is glossed over or never addressed.

What further fogs up the lens are the cutaways to the unfolding drama of the 2000 presidential election, which come across as tangential and too polemical for the story at hand. The black folks in this small, segregated town are much more preoccupied with daily survival than with the Grand Guignol of Republican shenanigans.

Dee wins her case, finally; a law or two is changed, and everyone gets to praise the Lord in church. But in real life, the oppressive, racist DA won re-election and still serves as the county prosecutor. Now, they should make a movie about that.

Nick Charles is a regular contributor to The Root.