The Oprah Winfrey-produced documentary, streaming on Apple TV+, is an appraisal of the man many consider America’s greatest actor.
The story, which Poitier recounts halfway through the film, doubles as a metaphor for the actor’s legacy. He spent his life achieving the impossible: He became an actor, was commercially viable and was the first Black person to win the Academy Award for Best Actor.
His ascendance in Hollywood — an historically nationalistic, conservative and racist industry — more than fulfilled the soothsayer’s predictions. Poitier’s early years were marked by movement and discovery. He spent the first fifteen years of his life in the Bahamas, first in Cat Island and then in Nassau. Moving to the capital broadened Poitier’s understanding of the world — it was there that he remembers seeing a car for the first time and learned how reflections in mirrors work. Hudlin shoots the interviews in which Poitier talks about his upbringing close up, so that the actor’s face almost always engulfs the screen. This vantage point replicates the intimacy conjured in Poitier’s performances. When he asks “do you hear me?” after telling the story about the mirror, it feels as though he is speaking to us, the viewers, on an individual level. It’s this presence that made Poitier a successful actor, although he didn’t start out that way. After 15 years in the Bahamas, Poitier moved to Miami. Before relocating to the United States, Poitier did not consider what he looked like. “I just saw what I saw,” he says at one point. But spending time in Florida changed what he saw and how he processed it. He began to witness the violent relationship between race and power. Poitier eventually moved to Harlem, where he took a job as a dishwasher and learned how to read. He had never acted before but after coming across an audition call in the, he tried his hand at it. The audition went terribly, but Poitier, not one to be told no, resolved to get better. He purchased a radio so that he could lose his accent by mimicking Norman Brokenshire’s silky voice. He bought books and took classes, struggling through lines as he worked multiple service jobs. When he scored another audition and booked a role, theater became his therapy. “Acting offered me an area where I could be an exhibitionist, where I could give vent to some of my frustrations, where I could pour out some of my confusion and other ills into a fictitious character,” Poitier says in the doc. For Poitier, acting was a site of play, a way to inhabit lives unavailable to him. Perhaps that’s why his performances were so electric. Oncemoves past the biographical dump of the first half, it organizes Poitier’s life through his roles. From
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