Mark Reviews Movies: SON OF THE SOUTH

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 4, 2021

Something feels off about Son of the South, the story of Bob Zellner, a young man from Alabama who became the first white field secretary of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was a major group in the Freedom Rides during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Yes, the movie, based on Zellner's autobiography The Wrong Side of Murder Creek (written with Constance Curry), tells one white man's story in the midst of a massive, nationwide effort to ensure the legal rights of African-Americans, but that's not necessarily the issue.

There is something of an idea in taking this angle, mainly in how impacts of prejudice and racism spread beyond the targets of such personal and systemic hatred. Bob, as played by Lucas Till, may look and sound like some ordinary "good ol' boy" of the American South, but in even suggesting to his peers and friends and family members that segregation is wrong, he becomes a direct target of harassment, threats, and violence.

It's not worse than what his Black friends and colleagues have suffered and are suffering, of course, but the people doing the harassing, making the threats, and performing the violence hate Bob just the same. He's a "traitor" and a whole slew of other words that won't be written here.

On a certain level, this story, perhaps, needs to be told, although it's also, surely, for a very specific audience. It's for people—and, let's just be forthright about it, white people specifically—who understand the history of racism in this country and maybe even acknowledge that it persists in some way to this day. Something should be done about it, for sure, the members of this audience might think, and that's the end of such thinking. Here's a young man, with nothing personal to gain but a lot to lose, who did do something. Follow that example.

It's definitely a well-intentioned story, and it does place the movie's version of Bob on the sidelines. He's no hero. He's no savior. At least in what we see from his story in the movie, he is nothing particularly special in the bigger fight for civil rights, but that's not what matters. It matters that he simply did something at a time when a lot of people either ignored the problem, caused it, or made it so much worse.

The issue here with writer/director Barry Alexander Brown's movie, then, is that it inherently undermines whatever broader importance this story might have. In the movie, Bob doesn't matter. He rides the fence for a while, and after he decides to become involved in the civil rights movement, he tries to keep his head down.

His place in the wider story here is as it likely was and probably should be—in the backdrop, eventually doing what he can and what he feels comfortable doing. It's about the least this character could do. While there's some honesty in the movie admitting that, we really do start to wonder if that's the best angle the filmmakers could find for this story. Meanwhile, the actual civil rights fight falls into the background of Bob's story, which seems to defeat an even bigger purpose.

We follow Bob in his transformation from a politically aware college senior, preparing to go to graduate school, interviewing Reverend Ralph Abernathy (Cedric the Entertainer) and Rosa Parks (Sharonne Lanier) for a class paper. After the meeting, he's not-so-politely asked to leave school. Bob's girlfriend Carol Anne (Lucy Hale) wants him to stay out of politics, because she has their lives planned out for them, and this isn't part of it.

Bob starts that way. The KKK, with his own grandfather (played by the late Brian Dennehy) as a member, comes to campus. He keeps watching the news of Black people being beaten by police, assaulted for sitting at diner counters, and marching. After missing the bus to participate in a Freedom Ride, he decides to take the summer volunteering at the SNCC headquarters.

The most insightful parts of this movie are the scenes of Bob gradually confronting and being confronted by his white friends and the grandfather, who are so engrained in racism that they cannot even fathom why this young man, "one of their own," would even consider such thoughts of racial equality. Bob's race is, paradoxically, both a reason for these people to target him and a shield from the worst of what they are capable.

The grandfather, after giving a lengthy speech about how he doesn't hate (which inevitably leads to a diatribe of hatred), threatens to put bullet in his own grandson's head if it comes down to it, but Bob walking away with Joanne (Lex Scott Davis), a young Black woman in the movement, shuts up the old man. A climactic scene has one of Bob's old friends coming close to lynching him, until some others realize Bob is actually a bona fide Southern boy.

He's a protected to a degree, and that comes across a bit too much in Till's performance, which makes Bob feel more like an observer in a bigger story that really isn't his. For all its noble intentions, then, Son of the South never quite figures out its purpose.

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