“I still remember the Friday night when the news hit: Chadwick Boseman, rising movie star, died of stage III colon cancer at age 43.
“It was an astounding shock to the system. There were rumblings that the man might be sick ever since he dropped that damn Instagram post looking quite slim. But it didn’t seem like he’d be going anywhere anytime soon. But, one night, it happened, and a lot of us haven’t gotten over it.
Perhaps what’s more surprising about his death is how he continued to churn out performances — great performances, mind you — after he was diagnosed with cancer in 2016. Before his diagnosis, he already received praise for starring in the biopics 42 and Get On Up, giving confident, complicated turns as Black icons Jackie Robinson and James Brown, respectively. But he became a megastar when he headlined the global Marvel blockbuster Black Panther in 2017, making the entire planet realize how powerful and wonderful the sight of a Black superhero can be.
When he wasn’t fulfilling his contractual duties in other MCU films, he once again played an African-American legend — Thurgood Marshall — in the 2018 courtroom drama Marshall and even went the cop-on-the-edge route as a detective chasing cop killers unraveling a conspiracy in the 2019 action thriller 21 Bridges.
In the last two movies he appeared in, Spike Lee’s thought-provoking action-adventure Da 5 Bloods and George C. Wolfe’s adaptation of the August Wilson play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (both films released last year by Netflix), Boseman played men who were basically bubbling cauldrons of Black rage, rage that was obviously stewed from years of racism and oppression. In Bloods, he was ‘Stormin’ Norman’ Holloway, the wise leader of a squad of African-American soldiers fighting in Vietnam. He convinces them to bury a locker of gold bars from a CIA airplane crash so they can come back and collect the loot, but greed is not his motivation. For him and his boys, this is long-overdue reparations.
“While Holloway was a cool supporting character in Bloods, he went all out for his lead performance in Bottom. As cocky, early-20th century trumpet player/aspiring songwriter Levee Green, he was at his swaggerific finest. But under all that preening arrogance is a man wounded and scarred, trying to make it the same white man’s world that has already broken him, bruised him and kicked him to the curb. Boseman posthumously received the Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama Golden Globe for his harrowing, heartbreaking performance. And, in all likelihood, he will get the Best Actor Oscar he was recently nominated for.
“The fact that he turned out all this great work while battling cancer shows that Boseman was just as strong and defiant a warrior as the Wakandan superhero he played in those Marvel movies. The man absolutely refused to let an illness make him half-ass a performance. Whether he was in the lead or in the background, he always gave us his all — and then some.
“Although we’ll never see what Chadwick Boseman had planned in the future, we should no doubt be happy that he gave us his badass, Black-as-hell best when he was here with us.”
Craig D. Lindsey is a critic and journalist whose work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, Nashville Scene, and Culturemap Houston. Craig is awesome.
Tomorrow morning: We begin the day at 9 AM with our favorite cinematic moments of 2020, then count down our top 10 films every hour, ending at 8 PM with our top movie of the past year!
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