Devotion (2022)

Devotion arrives as a sober, well-tailored war picture, the kind Hollywood used to make on a schedule. It concerns Ensign Jesse Brown, the first Black aviator to complete the Navy's basic flight training, and his friendship with Tom Hudner, a New England officer who volunteers for the same squadron. J.D. Dillard directs with a steady hand and a personal stake, his own father having flown as the lone Black man in a similar outfit. Jonathan Majors carries the film's weight in the cockpit and in the quieter rooms where the weight is worse. The casting is deliberate, a Black lead surrounded by a Black creative team, and the film wears that intention easily. Nothing about it feels like a memo.

The racial material is where the picture earns its keep. Brown endures racist neighbors, racist instructors, racist officers who would happily end his career, and the film lets us watch him absorb each insult without a speech attached. His private ritual, standing before a mirror and shouting slurs at himself as fuel, is the sharpest and least comfortable idea here. Hudner wants to fight these battles on his friend's behalf and is told, correctly, to simply be present. That restraint keeps the sermonizing to a minimum. There is earnestness, an occasional swell of score that nudges us toward a lesson, but the film mostly trusts the history to make its own argument.

Everything else on the ledger stays blank. No romantic subplot bends toward ideology, the wives remain wives, and the enemy is weather, terrain, and the Chinese Army. There is no lecture about capital, no carbon accounting, no discourse about bodies or brains. The film is a straightforward tribute, and it revises nothing. It also lost a fortune, roughly ninety million dollars by one estimate, which the studio will remember longer than the reviews did. A sturdy, honorable, unprofitable monument.