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" - 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 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. Tuff showed a remarkable degree of courage and foresight and also an instinct that her own history of troubles, would somehow make it through Hill's consciousness and persuade him to give himself up before he actually hurt anybody. "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. "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.
Review of Faith Under Fire
