The Problem Of The Hero

Bluesky

Adaptation is a tricky business. Taking words from the page and putting them in the mouths of characters on a stage or a screen is no mean feat in itself. With The Problem Of The Hero, co-writers James A Hodge and Ian Finley attempt a tricky double loop, adapting Finley’s play Native which, in turn, reimagines the off-stage conflict between pioneering Black author Richard Wright and Pullitzer prize-winning white dramatist Paul Green over the Broadway adaptation of Wright's successful novel Native Son. The drama plays out in the run-up to their play’s 1941 debut, co-produced by Orson Welles (Charlie Cannon).

The film, directed by feature debutant Shaun Dozier, retains the density of dialogue you might expect from a stage play but, by leaning into the theatrical nature of the proceedings, Dozier is in some ways able to make this into a virtue.

Wright and Green (J Mardrice Henderson and David zum Brunnen impressively reprising their stage roles) take on large chunks of dialogue in which they wrestle with the play’s ending. Green advocates for what he considers a more palatable ‘redemptive’ ending for the central character Bigger Thomas on Death Row, while Wright becomes increasingly determined to stick to the book’s original ending, which is less sympathetic towards him but hammers home the part a racist and iniquitous society had in shaping him.

The question inevitably becomes who has the right to tell a story, with Finley and Hodge laying out both sides of the coin through the men’s elaborate argument. Although the script is weighty it remains believable since both men were not only of high intellect but also had fiercely political – though differing – beliefs, with Wright a committed Communist and Green coming at the argument from a capitalist perspective. There’s enough of the personal woven through this to round them out, helped by additional characters who act as sounding boards from time to time, including an impressive turn from Brandon Haynes, as Canada Lee, who is playing Thomas onstage.

Although the argument still arrives in sizeball quantities, Dozier uses the back and forths of the staging of the play to add movement and mood. One key scene, for example, plays out during a tech run-through for the play, shifting the background colour the men are arguing in from blue to red. Sound design is also used creatively to evoke various moods, although the score from Lenora Zenzalai Helm and Fred Story has a tendency to become overpowering in places. Smoke is also often used to wreath scenes and add atmosphere although for all that zum Brunnen convinces us that Green is “a talker” he is rather less successful at suggesting he’s a committed smoker, seeming to take only the most tentative of puffs despite holding a cigarette much of the time.

When it comes to the serious business of the argument, however, the film is sound as a bell, raising the philosophical question of whether it is enough to empathise with a situation to be able to write about it, as Green would argue, or whether true representation can only come with experience. This subject, not just in the context of race, but in terms of other sorts of onscreen representation, is one that has an enduring relevance in the modern world – and Finley and Hodge leave their audience with plenty to think about.

The film will be released on streaming platforms worldwide on March 28.