A Most Beautiful Thing

A Most Beautiful Thing

I was reluctant to watch “A Most Beautiful Thing” by Mary Mazzio a second time. It premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March 2020, before its national release was postponed due to the pandemic and it feels like an eternity ago. COVID-19 has not only changed how we live in the months since then, but it has also exacerbated class and racial inequality in ways no one could have anticipated.

You can’t look at this story of what it’s like to grow up on the West Side of Chicago without thinking about which communities have been hit hardest by COVID-19, and that’s before you consider how the murder of George Floyd tore away the curtain on police violence and white privilege or that this summer saw an alarming number of kids killed in a city known for its murder rate a city where Black rowers reached out to white cops and took them for a boat ride.

The movie seems now like an elegy for communities fractured by disease and guns four months later. But still, there is humanity here, still there is hope if anything, more so in light of what summer 2020 has taught us about peace.“Peace,” says one man who rows through cancer therapy after recovering from addiction during heroin-era Cabrini Green drug wars; another speaks of finding solace while training alone between funerals; others echo them: Peace. Peace.

“A Most Beautiful Thing” tells the story of these men on Manley High School’s rowing team. It is about young Black guys becoming best friends they never expected to make on water nobody expects them to be near (much less navigate). Coming from broken homes with mothers addicted to drugs or fathers absent sometimes both they were easy targets for gangs. More than once they say it themselves: Anybody could join any gang any time on West Side Chicago streets where you will die if you don’t.

They followed Arshay Cooper, a charismatic leader who could anchor his own documentary. Inspired by the team’s new family, he went on to become an entrepreneur and mentor. Cooper was all those things before this film. This is more than one guy’s story, however. Mazzio has many tales to tell in this movie, and she tells them well but it is Cooper who serves as her through line here.Cooper wrote a book about rowing for Manley after one coach died and another quit; that led to the police involved reunion race.

And so that’s where we are now: Somewhere along the way between Cabrini Green drug wars and George Floyd protests; amid the reign of ’90s terror among Chicago teens and 2020 terror on Chicago streets some kids who grew up getting stopped by cops in white neighborhoods got in a boat with some white officers from those same neighborhoods. They saw each other as humans. What took so long?

Mazzio frames the story of the Manley rowing team with their backgrounds, sharing brief stories about their lives and broader statistics such as that children in gang-influenced neighborhoods have higher rates of PTSD than combat veterans a figure that must be even higher after 2020. Think about the last four months. What will 2020 do to our youth? It’s a haunting question that isn’t being asked enough. When one of the rowers says, “When they shut down the YMCAs, I went to the streets,” it drives home how little we hear about the pandemic and its effect on violence this summer, when safe spaces were closed.

There is a lot going on in “A Most Beautiful Thing,” but Mazzio succeeds by keeping her subjects front and center at all times. Arshay is not the only charismatic leader here. Each one of these young men many with kids of their own now is open and honest about his background and how one shift affected everything going forward. It’s an incredibly compassionate approach to filmmaking. You could make a whole documentary just filled with smiles and laughter, which may sound simple but is much harder than most people think. Common may do some narrating here, but Mazzio lets her subjects tell the story; she hands it over to them in every way, just like their coaches let them row themselves down those channels.

Some of it is a bit blunt, especially in terms of swelling music choices or over-editing sections for maximum emotional impact (as if they needed any help). But what struck me while watching “A Most Beautiful Thing,” especially toward its end, was how much director Mary Mazzio reminds me of Steve James when he’s making movies about his favorite city in America (Chicago) or his beloved hoops or both at once (“Hoop Dreams”).

James is our most empathetic documentarian maybe our most empathetic filmmaker, period a man who can get people to tell stories about themselves that they never even dreamed of telling. And like James, Mazzio knows when to give people space just to be, space just to stand there and express their joy or fear for as long as they want on camera. Her interest in Arshay Cooper and his best friends is honest and comes through in every frame.

“A Most Beautiful Thing” was scheduled to premiere in March. The pandemic had other plans. Life has changed since then, for Mazzio, for Cooper and for everyone involved in the film, and so some viewers will respond differently now than they would have four months ago to scenes of the team reaching out and trying to destigmatize police officers. And yet there’s a hope here that resonates beyond the changing context of its release.

This movie is not suggesting that one event one meeting of different races or classes in a boat can change everything (although I wouldn’t mind if it did). But it does believe that these moments have an impact on subsequent choices and opinions; they’re like the ripples from an oar, moving gently across the water.

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