Devotion (2022)

Score: 3 / 5

For the most part, Devotion is as average war film, and you largely get what you expect. It helps that it's a true story and that the "war" aspect is mostly in the background. It also helps that, for those of us who aren't fans of the Top Gun movies, this one graced us in a year otherwise largely bereft of typical war films. Crucially, and the only reason I really had much interest, it focuses its heart and story on civil rights: namely, the biographical account of Jesse Brown, the Korean War hero and pioneering Black naval pilot. The film doesn't try to make him a conventional activist or disruptor, and as such the film smartly skirts a lot of the rote rhythms and trappings of anti-racist flicks (specifically those involving war or sports). Which is to say, he's not a "magic Negro" or really even Othered in any concrete way, nor is the point of the film to "convert" his white counterparts into viewing Brown as a real person instead of a stereotype. As such, the white folks in this movie aren't the heroes by film's end.

It starts with Tom Hudner (Glen Powell, also a producer here) arriving at the Navy base in Pensacola in roughly 1950. He immediately meets Brown (Jonathan Majors), who is quiet and serious in his work, and they don't seem a likely pair at all, with Hudner's confident but naive suavity. Hudner seems like the former football star whose best days were in senior year, but he's pulled in by Brown's gravity. We see Brown's vitriolic but contained self-hatred in burning moments early on, in which he mumbles racist and misanthropic slurs at himself in the mirror. We don't see any of the racist violence enacted on him earlier in his career, thankfully, but it's clear he's not had it easy as one of the first Black men in this job. Majors masterfully contorts his face and carries heavy weight between his shoulders, sharing plenty of the torments and hardships he has endured. Their burgeoning allyship is in no way forced, and it takes most of the first half of the film to even get them to enjoy each other's company; it's endlessly believable, and it is so deliberately paced that it helps the film breathe, which so few in this vein do.

As the two grow together, the screenplay brilliantly avoids simplifying Brown's lived experience and even allows his character to grow; so often in these anti-racist flicks, the Black character's perspective is both stoic and stalwart, making the character strong and memorable but also inert and hardly human (or, I suppose, such stories hinge on the Black characters also humbling themselves along with the white characters to come to some sentimental appreciation for each other). Perhaps most meaningfully, this is clear when Brown eventually invites Hudner to his home to meet his wife and daughter, where Brown's entire physicality changes as he's free from the pressures and expectations and criticisms of both military atmosphere and civilian society.

The film's middle almost made me check out, as the constant flight drills became a bit repetitive and highly technical. There were multiple scenes when I almost wondered aloud in the cinema if anyone really knew what the pilots were talking about. And then there are the airborne dogfights, which I care about as much as I do car chases, but director J.D. Dillard and his team (including cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt of Mank and Mindhunter) make the experience wonderfully immersive in terms of fierce editing, teeth-rattling sounds, and beautiful visuals. At least these sequences mostly have purpose and aren't just flights for the sake of spectacle.

It's a really long film, and by the time of the ending, I wished two hours hadn't already gone by because it is otherwise really affecting. There's a lot to be said for the freedom Brown experienced through Majors's performance at home and in the sky; it makes his efforts, and really mostly his alone, heroic because he's at once a living rebellion and a quiet, unassuming cog in the machine. He knows what to do, and he does it to the best of his ability, which makes him a perfect soldier. And the film itself doesn't collapse under the weight of racial tension nor does it bend to stereotypical Hollywood tropes in similar stories. Let's hope this movie helps set the course for future war movies about real heroes and real issues facing them.