Director Reginald Hudlin’s “Sidney” was made with the full and keenly interested cooperation of the Poitier family, following a template of access many documentaries favor or, in some cases, settle for.
This is one of the good ones. Its format limitations (a stand-alone feature, under two hours) and the personnel involved lead, perhaps inevitably, to more of a classy overview of a singular breakthrough artist than a deeper examination of Poitier’s impact. Plainly, the man deserves something of the breadth of the six-hour HBO series on Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. But with Poitier’s death earlier this year, at 94, “Sidney” serves as both a timely remembrance and a reminder of how stardom intersects with the world, sometimes, and what Poitier did to keep his sanity in the face of uniquely burdensome expectations.
Oprah Winfrey produced the documentary, along with Derik Murray, and Winfrey’s 2012 interview footage with Poitier (just him alone on camera) provides the throughline. Straight to the lens, in that unforgettable, gently Bahamanian cadence, Poitier recalls his early years on Cat Island in the Bahamas. Race was not a concept, or a threat, to young Sidney, until he left Nassau (where he saw his first mirror, his first car) for Miami, at his father’s arrangement, at age 15. Poitier was born in Miami during his parents’ visit; two months premature, he was not expected to live.
