Judge Clarence Thomas' nomination to the United States' Supreme Court is called into question when former colleague, Anita Hill, testifies that he had sexually harassed her.

Plot Synopsis:
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grimalkin-2 from United States
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The movie did a fine job of condensing the confirmation hearing of Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court, and Anita Hill's accusations that Thomas had sexually harassed her on numerous occasions and was morally unfit to become a justice. Various issues are explored, including sexual harassment in the workplace, sexual harassment by an African American in the workplace, and sexual harassment by an African American male directed toward an African American female in the workplace. If there is a villain in the piece, it is neither Anita Hill nor Clarence Thomas (beautifully portrayed by Kerry Washington and Wendell Pierce respectively), but the Democratic chairman, Joe Biden (Greg Kinnear), of the Senate committee debating Thomas's qualifications. From start to finish Biden is presented as a wuss, easily swayed and manipulated by Republicans to present Thomas in the best possible light. Along the way, Biden also loses witnesses to affirm Clarence Thomas's alleged behavior toward Anita and other women. The movie confronts the cowardliness of liberal white men (all the Democrats on the committee) dealing with sexual harassment charges that concern a black man, with the possible exception of the late-blooming Edward Kennedy who finally comes to Anita Hill's defense. For the most part, Republicans have a field day in attempting to destroy Anita Hill's reputation with bogus charges while Democrats remain mute. Greg Kinnear is completely credible as Biden as is Treat Williams as Ted Kennedy. The movie stresses how this confirmation hearing resulted in the country's growing sensitivity to sexual harassment. But it also shows how Joe Biden's ineptness results not only in Clarence Thomas's confirmation, but a generation of conservative opinions from the Supreme Court.

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gmclean-24636
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The HBO film, "Confirmation" documents the grueling events of Judge Clarence Thomas' US Supreme Court confirmation hearings. For a young person that is not as familiar with the history behind his confirmation to the US Supreme Court this film was very shocking and very upsetting. Before watching this movie I did not know about all of the controversy that surrounded his nomination and I had never heard of Anita Hill. When President Bush nominated Thomas (Wendell Pierce) to replace Thurgood Marshall the nation was overall convinced that he would be confirmed by the Senate. However when Anita Hill (Kerry Washington) is asked to come forward to with her testimony of sexual harassment against Thomas the chaos begins. The director Rick Famuyiwa includes news clips that were live during the hearings which enhances the audiences' experience. The news clips make the viewers feel as if the hearings are taking place now. Also this film includes many behind the scenes looks into what occurred without the public's knowledge and it is very disturbing. I would recommend this film because of the outstanding acting and the important message.

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newjersian from United States
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When somebody is making a movie showing 100 years or more old events, the fantasy can be wild. Only a couple of specialists would bother to check the facts. However, here we are dealing with an event that most of us still remember. Why then Confirmation is trying to sell us bold lies? 25 years later we know that Anita Hill lied about her experiences on several occasions. We know that many women who worked with Clarence Thomas shared with the public the positive experiences they had with their boss. We also know now that the plot to derail the Thomas's confirmation was organized by the leftist operatives because they were afraid that Thomas can vote against abortion rights. The film is absolutely dishonest. It distorts the events, it pictures Anita Hill as an absolute saint and Clarence Thomas as a sexual predator which he isn't. The movie is another piece of garbage produced by leftist film makers. The only good thing about this movie is that it will be forgotten very quickly as a usual HBO flop.

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edwagreen from United States
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Outstanding study of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill controversy of 1991 with Greg Kinnear a standout as Sen. Joseph Biden, head of the senate committee investigations the allegations made by Prof. Hill. Kinnear actually sounded like Joe Biden and he was quick to profanity behind the scenes.

The person portraying Prof. Hill, Kerry Washington, did not come across as a college professor until things really began to heat up.

Definitely a fine film showing how politics entered into the fray. Too bad that Jennifer Hudson's character never was able to testify. It would have brought out more from the Oscar winner Hudson.

The man who played Sen. Simpson from Wyoming gave a convincing supporting performance.

Certainly the affects of the controversy played a major role in women gaining political clout as shown by the 1992 elections.

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MovieHoliks
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I got around to watching the latest from HBO Films the other night. If you recall all the hoopla surrounding Anita Hill and SCOTUS nominee, Clarence Thomas, back in '91- the pubic hair on the Coke can, "Long Dong Silver", etc..- this movie will bring back some, um, "memories"-??? confused emoticon Kerry Washington plays the law professor who brings up these issues at the time, and Wendell Pierce is Thomas. The film goes into how reluctant Hill was to get involved- how she was sorta drawn into the whole thing, and how Republicans and Democrats (mostly made up of men who were involved in their own sex scandals at the time) really didn't want to delve too deep into the issue. Greg Kinnear plays Joe Biden, who was the reluctant head of the investigating committee. Treat Williams is well cast as Ted Kennedy. This was yet another really well-done film in the line of HBO originals. Even if you don't want to revisit that whole controversy, I think you will enjoy all the goings-on in backrooms, and the observing of the political processes. Definite thumbs up for this movie. Jennifer Hudson and Eric Stonestreet co-star.

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Robert J. Maxwell (rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming, New Mexico, USA
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In 1991 President G. H. W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, an African-American, for a position on the Supreme Court. A young law professor who had worked with him, Anita Hill, testified in an investigation that he had sexually harassed her. The allegations most remember are probably Thomas' asking bout a pubic hair on his can of Pepsi and he referring to a character named Long Dong Silver that he'd seen in a porn movie. Legal entanglements abounded, dominated by public relations. Thomas was confirmed.

The movie clearly takes the part of Anita Hill without storming the ramparts. She's shown as a quiet professor at the University of Oklahoma who was contacted by the press in a routine inquiry about Thomas' nomination. She told the reporter of her experiences after a promise that her name would never become public. The reporter made the entire incident public and the result was an investigation in which Thomas angrily declared that what was going on was nothing more than a "high tech lynching." At the time, it sounded plausible enough to me, but I thought, well, so what? I was more interested in his politics than his putting moves on some woman in the work place.

His politics and his performance as a judge didn't measure up. The American Bar Association denied him its highest ranking of "well qualified." Thomas claimed that he'd never had a conversation or given any thought to the controversial Roe vs. Wade decision. And since his appointment he's been invariably conservative and since 1998 has asked only one question from the bench. He's probably the least of our nine -- or rather eight -- Supreme Court Justices.

Yet he was confirmed by a narrow margin with bi-partisan votes. I was curious about the Dems who voted in his favor. Here are the states those Dems represented: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Virginia.

It's too bad the movie makes such a pitiable suffering victim out of Anita Hill, although that's what she was. An attractive and intelligent black woman (Yale Law School) who may well have been subject to unwelcome and vulgar comments from her boss.

Still, she's certainly not Mother Theresa or Roma Downey. In the film she comes across as a stereotype, the harassed, betrayed, victimized woman. And the actress, Kerry Washington, is believable but no more than that. She has little range. She's not particularly INTERESTING and when she shouts something in anger it sounds acted.

As Clarence Thomas, Wendell Pierce is rather a blank coin. He denies everything. He's indignant. But he's even more of a cardboard cutout than Hill's character. His white wife, Alison Wright, stands staunchly by his side, showing no more animation than a figure in the President's Hall at Disney World.

The only casting choice that stands out is that of the usually forgettable Greg Kinnear, who is Joe Biden, chairman of the committee. He looks a little like the younger Biden but his voice -- deliberately or not -- bears an uncanny resemblance to Biden's.

Hill may be shown as put upon and Thomas as virtuous but if there is a man who clearly makes misjudgments, it's Joe Biden, who shuts down the inquiry before the witnesses have a chance to speak, and who does so because he's brow beaten into compliance by angry peers who want the whole blasted thing to disappear from the media because it's giving the Senate a bad rep.

On the whole it's inoffensive and a little bland. I guess that's better than white hot agitprop.

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MisterWhiplash from United States
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The bottom line with Confirmation is that it's not complex as far as the plot goes, and this is particularly if you know the history. In fall of 1991 Thurgood Marshall retired from SCOTUS, and, feeling the pressure to nominate a black man to the court, Bush picked Clarence Thomas, a man who many felt wasn't qualified for the court (as Jeffrey Wright's character says at one point, "I have students who are better qualified than Clarence Thomas"). But when asked by someone from Senator Biden's office about whether or not he should be confirmed, Anita Hill couldn't hold back and be silent and told the truth: she was sexually harassed, as far as having to hear vulgar talk about sex (i.e. "Long Dong Silver" is a thing in a court of public record, I mean Jesus), and asked out on multiple occasions. It got out to the press, she had to go testify, as did Thomas, and all this before a seemingly immovable date for the man's confirmation.

This all could have made for a compelling mini-series, or an even longer movie. What is a little disappointing about is that this is probably the best this kind of movie could be, but it's still not quite good enough, or I should say that the detail isn't exactly strong enough. Mostly I found that the depiction of Clarence Thomas not exactly weak but basic: for such a man who I may find reprehensible (from before and during his 25 past years on the court), Wendell Pierce gives Thomas as a person, and character in this story, some dignity, and Anita Wright as Clarence Thomas' wife as well. But what about anything else aside from his indignation and sad faces? What else was/is there to Thomas?

Maybe that just wasn't the focus, and director Fumiyama (of last year's surprise critical hit Dope), wanted to keep it on the politics and especially the media - many figures who you might recognize from CNN and elsewhere in cable news pop up as younger selves - certainly keeps a good eye on that. But what does make an impact and what is certainly good to look past the flaws here, are a) Kerry Washington's performance, which is so unwavering in making Anita Hill a figure of sympathy but also aching empathy, completely stripping anything else except this woman and having to put up being solid in front of the committee. And b) how the story and movie treats the whole aspect of how equal rights were not there in 1991, and may still not be (or, to put it another way, despite the changes the struggle is ongoing), for women in this country.

Like the recent People vs OJ series, we get a story that seems to deal a lot in race - Thomas' "High tech lynching" comment that struck an emotional chord for some but was seen as being disingenuous by others - and yet it's really about how women fit it, or certainly do not, in a world full of men. Images of women and how they talk and react, every little thing that they say, is under the kind of scrutiny here that men just don't have to face, at least not to this level. Confirmation is about the representation of a woman's image in politics, in the media, in the public at large, and what that does when up against a "street fight" as one of the raging white male Republican senators says. You can read a lot into what the hearings, as seen in this story, say about the national public character, and yet it's displayed for us to see in those hearings, and the behind-the-scenes fights and digging for dirt via the Republican senators, as opposed to spelled out all the time.

Confirmation doesn't stretch entirely too far for it to be great, or quite on the level of Recount or Game Change as far as HBO original movies about hot-button/controversial political stories in this country from the modern age, but within what it tries to do, and from the acting from all the players that is never less than convincing (Kinnear, who plays a rather unsympathetic Senator Biden, who screwed up things in the hearing just as far as scheduling people to testify, is one of those), it works. I'd even watch it again if just to see how Washington pulls off the majority of her scenes.

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Mcc8007 from United States
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Great casting, writing, and performances. It's very difficult to separate political opinions from opinions about this film. As usual, HBO does a great job depicting these accusations and subsequent hearings objectively and inspiring discussion about them. Since they don't cast Thomas in a very good light, I'm guessing the lower rating is due to some Thomas defenders who don't want to be reminded of the accusations. It's difficult to watch this in light of Thomas's subsequent lackluster performance on the Supreme Court without concluding that Bush should have withdrawn the nomination. Both Kerry Washington and Wendell Pierce did an outstanding job, as did the entire cast. I remember this well and the movie is historically accurate -- no matter who seeks to deny it.

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Benmo Ben from Canada
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I'm not gonna touch the subject or the story line. Democrats or Republican are the two sides of same coin.

What I would like to question: Who tout that Kerry Washington is a fit for this role? After three seasons of Scandal (two more that I should had watch) and a few movies, I can't see why someone consider that she's a phenomenal actress. Let's just observe her performance, her facial expression is the same on every emotional situation; a happy scene, an angry one, an intense or an excited one; her facial expression is the same and that is not the mark of let's say a good acting skill.

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secondtake from United States
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Confirmation (2016)

A straight up re-telling of an historical case—the Supreme Court confirmation fiasco around Clarence Thomas as he denied sexual harassment charges from Anita Hill, a former aide.

All is well and good here. I think for those who haven't heard of the case, or who want the details, this is a decent (and entertaining way) of learning some facts. However, I thin ten minutes on the web would give you the same gist. For those who have lived it, one way or another (as I have), it's a little too much the obvious facts, the history we already know.

So it may live up to its intention to keep the incident alive 25 years later, but it isn't quite compelling movie-making. Certainly the LBJ equivalent (from 25 years earlier still) called "All the Way" is a better movie and has better acting and a richer plot.

So it is what it is and don't expect too much. I think it's important stuff, and it energized a lot of women (before the current generation which is oddly passive about women's rights). See it along those lines.

supreme court|lawyer|congressional hearing|african american|sexual harassment|

AKAs Titles:


Certifications:
Singapore:NC16