REVIEW: 'Sidney,' the new Apple+ documentary about Sidney Poitier, works as a beginner's course on the screen icon — but his story is too rich and complex for a two-hour film to cover.
This, only three years after the Civil Rights Acts of 1964. Only a year before the murder of Martin Luther King. Poitier was something people could agree on during an otherwise agitated, disagreeable era.
The result is about what you’d expect from an actor whose story is, in fact, stranger, more vibrant, than mythology might allow: It’s good, but it can’t always get its hands dirty. An hour and a half into its two-hour runtime and we’re still in 1968, flying through a social history ever twined to a personal one.
The difficulty of making a documentary about the life of Sidney Poitier is, in part, that he was a symbol, that he knew as much and tried to live his life accordingly. The greater difficulty is simply a result of that life in itself: It’s too interesting. It ties into too much.