by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched last night’s
“premiere” of one of the most extraordinary original movies Lifetime has ever
given us: Faith Under Fire: The Antoinette Tuff Story. Directed by Vondie Curtis-Hall (a Black man rather than the Black woman I’d previously assumed
he was) who’s worked mostly as an actor — he was on episodes of both Law and
Order and the spinoff Law and
Order: Special Victims Unit, the
latter during Christopher Meloni’s last season on the show — and whose main
directorial credit before this was a Lifetime biopic of Toni Braxton called Toni
Braxton: Un-Break My Heart, Faith
Under Fire actually stars the real
Toni Braxton — though all we get to hear of her singing voice is a bit in the
opening scene in which her radio is broadcasting Sam Cooke’s recording of “This
Little Light of Mine” from his Live at the Copa album and she starts singing along to it (and
quite frankly there are worse “ghost duets” imaginable than Toni Braxton and
Sam Cooke!) — as Antoinette Tuff, who on August 20, 2013 was working as a
bookkeeper at the McNair Learning Academy in Decatur, Georgia when she was
asked to cover the front desk during lunch because the usual school
receptionist had called in sick or something. While she was there a young man
named Michael Brandon Hill (Trevor Morgan) sneaked onto the school campus with
an AK-47 assault rifle and held Tuff at gunpoint, telling her that he was going
to kill everyone in the school and she must do exactly as he said or she’d be
victim number one. Showing a remarkable degree of courage and foresight and
also an instinct that her own history of troubles — including a $14,000 debt
and threats to repossess her car (crucial to her because in addition to working
at the school she also ran a private transportation business on the side), a
son in a wheelchair with a lifelong history of disabilities, and an ex-husband
who on the previous New Year’s Eve had announced to her that he’d been having
an affair and was leaving her for the new woman in his life — as well as a
background that at age 10, she had lost her mother to cancer and her dad and
his new wife had only reluctantly taken her and her siblings in, doing the Cinderella
number on them and forcing them to sleep on the living-room floor while his
wife’s kids by her previous husbands got the
beds — would somehow make it through Hill’s consciousness and persuade him to
give himself up before he actually hurt anybody.
As things turned out, no one
was killed in the incident and Tuff did eventually persuade Hill to give himself up — though quite frankly it
helped that out of all the crazed gunmen who’ve staged mass shootings at public
schools and other similar venues, Hill was one of the least competent. He came
to McNair with a gun, a whole bag of bullets and several magazines but had not pre-loaded his weapon — most of the truly deadly
mass shooters have come fully prepared, with magazines filled to their maximum
capacity and one already plugged into the gun, and police who’ve had to answer
such calls have told reporters that the deadliest moments in any “active
shooter” incident are the first 10 minutes, when the killer is firing away and
before anyone has had the chance to call the police and get them to respond.
Fortunately Hill did not fire on any students or teachers in the school, just
the police who came and surrounded the school to apprehend or kill him and a
middle-aged Black schnook who happened to take his lunch break with headphones on, connected to a
smartphone that was playing rap, and who returned to the building totally
oblivious to what was going on and still with his headphones on so he couldn’t
hear any sounds that might have indicated he was in danger. In a post-film
“Biography” documentary on the real Antoinette Tuff, he was named as the
school’s cafeteria manager (then wouldn’t he have been on duty during lunch
hour?), but in the movie he just manages to come off as the typical innocent
victim done in as much by his own unawareness of his surroundings as the
malevolence of his would-be killer. Indeed, I found myself pointing to his
image on TV and saying, “Stupid Black person,” then pointing at Toni Braxton as
Antoinette Tuff and saying, “Smart Black person.” He didn’t kill anybody and
the only person he even wounded was himself when he was winged by a police bullet — his motive in the
whole incident, at least as writers Laura Harrington and Stephen Kay portrayed
it, seems to have been “suicide by cop” — and once Antoinette establishes that
via her communications with 911 operator Kendra McCray (the ridiculously named
Yaya DaCosta, who played Whitney Houston on yet another Lifetime biopic), she
tells the story of her own wretched existence and thoughts of suicide to let
Hill know that he’s not alone in the world and there are reasons for people to
care about him, and therefore he should let the cops arrest him rather than
follow through with his murderous plan.
Faith Under Fire is an excellent film in all respects, vividly and
straightforwardly directed by Vondie Curtis-Hall and containing two brilliant tour
de force performances by Toni
Braxton and Trevor Harris. Braxton plays her role with a quiet mixture of
implacability and strength reminiscent of Whoopi Goldberg in The Color
Purple, and Harris avoids the
usual clichés of actors playing psychopaths (the snarling of Lawrence Tierney
in Dillinger, Born to Kill and The Hoodlum and the
nice-guy exterior of Anthony Perkins in Psycho) and manages to convince us that his mental state
is really that jumbled that he can’t do anything right, including perpetrating a mass shooting. The
documentary on the real events they showed after the dramatic film was a bit
jarring — when the incident happened the real Antoinette Tuff was wearing her
hair similarly to the way Braxton does in the film, but since then she’s cut it
considerably shorter; also the real Michael Brandon Hill was (unsurprisingly)
considerably less physically attractive than Trevor Harris; and the pregnant
woman who’s allowed to leave at the outset of the incident and whom Tuff had
been trying to help get health insurance for her baby’s birth was cast with a
racially ambiguous actress in the dramatic film but was definitely Black in
real life. But Faith Under Fire: The Antoinette Huff Story is one of Lifetime’s most astonishingly good
productions, vividly dramatic, genuinely suspenseful and ending most movingly
with the phone call then-President Barack Obama placed to the real Antoinette
Huff to congratulate her for her heroism — and the gentle, soothing tones of
our last President stand in vivid contrast to our current one and make one
wonder how Trump would handle a similar situation if one occurred on his watch: probably make some pro forma acknowledgment of the courage of the person he was
talking to and then, as he always does, steer the conversation entirely towards
himself.
