Ali
Directed by Michael Mann 2001

The movie Ali plays up the Hollywood aspects of Muhammad Ali's life, but also provides some important background about his relationship with Malcolm X, his political views and actions. Unlike When We Were Kings, the documentary about Ali's fight with Foreman made in 1996, this movie focuses on Ali's younger years, ending with the fight in Zaire. As political history Ali provides some useful information on the history of Black anti- imperialism in the United $tates. But the Ali that Will Smith plays seems like he's not really sure what he's saying or what he believes politically, a stark contrast from the confident and outspoken man Ali really was. Smith's Ali stops short of being duped into his activism, but he appears confused and politically unclear most of the time. In the movie Ali seems like he's just making up his mind about Vietnam on the phone when a reporter asks him about it, and it never mentions that he was not just a member of the Nation of Islam (NOI) but was actually a Minister. Sacrificing clarity about his political activism to Hollywood showiness the movie makes much of Ali's sex life and includes lots of fight scenes, but plays down his arrogance and activism. This makes Ali a likeable man, more interesting to the white audience that is paying lots of money to see the movie. But Ali needed serious revolutionary arrogance to oppose the draft even when the NOI deserted him, he had no money, had lost his license to fight, and was facing five years in prison. This was not a man who was accidentally friends with Malcolm X because of his religion, it is a man who choose his friends based on his political beliefs and actions. The letter writer [in MIM Notes 251] is correct that there are lessons to be learned from the film's focus on Ali's relationships. For MIM these are lessons about the contradictions of gender in the fight for national liberation. And in this we stress that for revolutionaries anti-imperialist action takes precedence over persynal failings. We can not dismiss the important activism of revolutionary and anti-imperialist leaders because of the gender contradictions in their lives. (Nor can we dismiss the contributions people made in their youth because of the mistakes of their old age. The fact that Ali recently pledged to tour the Muslim world building support for Amerika's so-called 'war on terrorism' only underscores the correctness of his earlier stance against the war in Vietnam.) It is important to continue fighting gender oppression as a system rather than getting bogged down fighting individual faults.