Sidney Poitier’s death in January was one of the year’s most disconcerting celebrity losses. Living luminaries of classical Hollywood cinema are few and far between, and Poitier was the key bridging figure between that era and the industry’s more progressive present. That sense of a severed connection to the past is driven home by Sidney (Apple TV+), a new documentary made with his participation shortly before his passing. Directed by the veteran Black film-maker Reginald Hudlin, it’s a warm, generous portrait, if not an especially penetrating one, serving best as a primer for younger audiences on Poitier’s trailblazing status as a leading man in white-ruled Hollywood.
Talking heads such as Oprah Winfrey attest to his famed dignity and diplomacy in an uneasy symbolic position, as well as the blazing onscreen charisma that drew conservative audiences to then adventurous films about American racial inequality. Sidney is unsurprisingly more circumspect when it comes to accommodating Poitier’s critics, ironing out certain nuances in his relationship to the civil rights movement and gesturing to James Baldwin’s thoughts on Poitier as a problematically sanctified figure without including the writer’s actual arguments. Poitier’s own presence is the film’s strongest asset: his narration of his impoverished upbringing in the Bahamas, and his first encounters with Jim Crow racism in America, is stirring and resonant, that marvellous voice reaching and teaching his audience for the last time.
