Mark Reviews Movies: CREATED EQUAL: CLARENCE THOMAS IN HIS OWN WORDS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 30, 2020

As they are presented here, the beliefs of Clarence Thomas could be summed up with his description of how he reacted to the news that he had been confirmed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court: "Whoop-de-damn-do." Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words presents a man whose personal philosophy and political leanings are hollow and, for most of his life, were transitory. He grew up poor, became a left-wing radical in college, found a job working for a Republican after law school, determined he was more of a libertarian who wanted nothing to do with the government, and then spent the rest of his life taking cushy government jobs.

During his confirmation hearing, then-Senator Joe Biden labeled Thomas an "enigma," and despite the man's refutations then and now, it seems like the most apt description of Thomas at that point in his life. He isn't much of a riddle now, serving on the Supreme Court as a strident Constitutional "originalist," who believes that the founding document should be interpreted exactly as it was written—in an act of almost divining the original intent of its authors.

Director Michael Pack's celebratory documentary doesn't seem too interested in Thomas' political beliefs. There are, perhaps, two or three scenes in which the filmmaker has the justice discuss his philosophy in any specifics, and even then, they're superficial.

It does allow the man to tell his life story in near-excruciatingly trivial levels of detail. The picture Thomas wants to present of himself (and which Pack allows him to without a single challenge) is of a man who worked hard to get his career and was never a victim—except when he basically admits he doesn't care about his current position and spent his entire confirmation process claiming to be a victim of, as he (in)famously called it, "a high-tech lynching."

That's the portrait we get of Thomas from his own story: a man of contradictions. Pack is either unprepared (because of the opportunity to interview a justice of the country's highest court) or unwilling (because of a sympathetic political bias) to confront any of them. Everything Thomas says, even when details don't line up, is taken at face value in Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words. Somehow, we come away from the movie understanding its subject even less than when it started.

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