Repeat testimony
The tagline for HBO’s Confirmation exults, “It only takes one voice to change history.” Although the story of Clarence Thomas’s confirmation as a Supreme Court justice is 25 years old, the film unsettles the viewer because it feels contemporary, and because controversy about the film mirrors the controversy in the 1990s over the actual event.
Confirmation is not quite a documentary and not quite fiction. It mixes footage from the ’90s with a script that draws heavily on quotations from Senate hearings. It also includes fictional scenes. Wendell Pierce is formidable as Thomas, especially in delivering Thomas’s statement that his treatment at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings amounted to “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.”
Kerry Washington gives a luminous performance as law professor Anita Hill, Thomas’s former employee, who accused Thomas of harassing her. Washington shines in the tense sequences when Hill testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee, detailing incidents of sexual harassment, including Thomas’s infamous comment about someone putting a pubic hair on his can of Coke.
