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Movie review: Devotion [1]
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Date: 2022-12-07
Jonathan Majors as Ensign Jesse Brown on the deck of an aircraft carrier.
★★★★☆ plus a half star
Quite a few critics are comparing Devotion to Top Gun: Maverick, in which Glen Powell starred as Lt. Seresin. Indeed the two movies’ plots have surprisingly similar trajectories. Unfortunately, the protagonists in Devotion don’t find old planes to commandeer in Korea, because that’s not something that actually happened in the real life story that inspired this movie.
I haven’t read any review mentioning that Glen Powell was also in Hidden Figures as astronaut John Glenn. But, to the credit of screenwriters Jake Crane and Jonathan Stewart, Devotion is not a white savior movie. In one case, the would-be white savior unwittingly creates a problem for the black protagonist that he can’t undo as easily as he created it.
Ensign Jesse Brown (Jonathan Majors) of Fighter Squadron 32 was the U. S. Navy’s very first black aviator. When Lt. j.g. Tom Hudner (Glen Powell) first meets Brown, it’s after Brown has been muttering some discouraging words to a mirror. Brown does the opposite of affirmations, I guess we could call them “negations”: he looks in the mirror and repeats to himself racist insults people have said to him.
Hudner has just transferred in. Having missed World War II, he hopes to prove himself in combat some day. There would be no shortage of wars, conflicts and skirmishes in the remainder of the century. The Korean War is coming up.
Brown, with his wife Daisy (Christina Jackson) and young daughter, was not particularly looking forward to combat, but he was very good at it, and brave, as his Distinguished Flying Cross citation attests:
The President of the United States of America takes pride in presenting the Distinguished Flying Cross (Posthumously) to Ensign Jesse Leroy Brown (NSN: 0-504477), United States Navy, for heroism in aerial flight as Pilot of a fighter plane in Fighter Squadron THIRTY-TWO (VF-32), attached to the U.S.S. LEYTE (CV-32), in hostile attacks on hostile North Korean forces. Participating in 20 strikes on enemy military installations, lines of communication, transportation facilities, and enemy troop concentrations in the face of grave hazard, at the Chosin Reservoir, Takshon, Manp Jin, Linchong, Sinuiju, Kasan, Wonsan, Chonjin, Kilchu, and Sinanju during the period 12 October to 4 December 1950. With courageous efficiency and utter disregard for his own personal safety, Ensign Brown, while in support of friendly troops in the Chosin Reservoir area, pressed home numerous attacks destroying an enemy troop concentration moving to attack our troops. So aggressive were these attacks, in the face of enemy anti-aircraft fire, that they finally resulted in the destruction of Ensign Brown's plane by anti-aircraft fire. His gallant devotion to duty was in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.
Lt. Hudner’s Medal of Honor citation is a spoiler for this movie, plus it has language even more dehumanizing to the enemy than the language in Brown’s Distinguished Flying Cross citation, so I won’t be quoting it here.
In a biopic, it’s usually necessary to compress the timeline. Screenwriters Jake Crane and Jonathan Stewart have indeed compressed the timeline from the book Devotion: An Epic Story of Heroism, Brotherhood and Sacrifice by Adam Makos. It could easily have been a 4-hour movie, or even longer, maybe.
The problem is that the compression in this movie makes it seem like Brown flew just one mission to take out a bridge and then just one mission to support ground troops in Chosin and that was it. As you read in the citation above, he participated in twenty strikes against the enemy.
Also, the writers want us to believe that Brown and Hudner were good friends. But from what we see on the screen, it’s just as easy to believe that when Hudner desperately tried to save Brown’s life, he was motivated more by a general desire to be a hero than by any specific feeling of friendship or loyalty for Brown.
Maybe if we had gotten more of a sense of multiple missions, it would be easier to believe in their friendship. I would have also liked a little bit about the black aviators after Ensign Brown who were inspired by his heroism.
However, Devotion is a better movie than Proud, which tells the story of some of the first enlisted black men in the Navy. Ossie Davis sets up frame story of an old man reminiscing about his time in the Navy during World War II.
But without that frame story, the screenplay for Proud feels like the writers just dumped the contents of Mary Pat Kelly’s book Proudly We Served: The Men of the USS Mason into the screenplay software and went from there.
Both Proud and Devotion are movies that needed to be made. Proud needs to be remade better. Devotion will do quite well for now: it has an 81% Tomatometer and 92% Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Devotion runs 2 hours and 19 minutes and is rated PG-13 “for strong language [including a racial slur uttered by Brown quoting others], some war/action violence, and smoking.”
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