![]() In the next sequence, a group of four Klansmen are shown shooting up the house of a white woman whom they say has a black boyfriend. inveighs against blacks (using, of course, the N-word, which is said repeatedly throughout the film), Jews, and Communists-not Catholics. Even here, Bissell muddies the historical waters: where, in the documentary, Ellis talks about the Klan’s main trio of enmities, toward “the blacks, Jews, and Catholics,” in “The Best of Enemies,” the fictionalized C. is first seen, he’s chairing a Klan meeting and setting out the group’s hatreds but adding that the movement is about being “a part of something bigger” than oneself. Ellis, taken from “ An Unlikely Friendship,” Diane Bloom’s 2002 documentary about Atwater and Ellis) talking about the sense of belonging that he got from his Klan membership. “The Best of Enemies” opens with images of a Ku Klux Klan initiation, accompanied by a voice-over (of the real-life C. ![]() P., in acknowledging his growing friendly feelings for Ann, must overcome a lifelong and deep-rooted hatred for black people, leading to his ultimate, and public, renunciation of his Klan membership and repudiation of white supremacy and segregation. It’s in the course of the subsequent reckoning, a rigorous, stressful, highly publicized ten-day affair, that Ann and C. Bill goes to Durham to run a town charrette on school integration-and taps Ann and C. Wilbur calls a colleague named Bill Riddick (Babou Ceesay), a black academic who has had success organizing charrettes, or conflict-resolution meetings, in other communities. With the town in conflict, a local white judge, hoping to defer imposing a decision (and seemingly hoping to placate white residents), accepts a suggestion from his white assistant, Wilbur Hobby (Ned Vaughn). Though black parents insist that their children be allowed to attend classes in a school reserved for whites, the officials force the black students back into a few usable classrooms in the damaged building. ![]() After an elementary school for black children is damaged by a fire, local officials-all white, all male-refuse to let these circumstances hasten school integration. Ellis, a white Durham resident who is the leader of a Ku Klux Klan chapter in the town. ![]() Henson as Ann Atwater, a black resident of Durham and a community organizer who helps other black residents on issues of housing discrimination, and Sam Rockwell as C. “The Best of Enemies” is set in Durham, North Carolina, in 1971, a time when that city’s schools were still segregated. But their similarities, which are marked, reflect a narrow, bowdlerized view of modern American history with which Robin Bissell, the writer and director of “The Best of Enemies,” is positioning the film. The differences between the two films are significant, in ways that are to the modest advantage of the new film. The best thing that can be said about “The Best of Enemies,” which opens Friday, is that it isn’t quite this year’s version of “ Green Book.” Like this year’s Oscar winner, “The Best of Enemies” is a historical drama, based on a true story, that’s set in the Jim Crow-era South and centers on an unlikely relationship between a black person and a white racist who, as a result of that relationship, comes to reconsider his racism.
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