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'Confirmation' made me feel bad for Clarence Thomas' wife

"Confirmation," Rick Famuyiwa's drama about Anita Hill's (Kerry Washington) testimony during the 1991 hearings on Clarence Thomas' (Wendell Pierce) nomination to the Supreme Court, arrives on HBO on Saturday on a tide of its own political controversy.

Some Republicans have complained that the movie is designed to make them look bad prior to the presidential election, though this doughty, respectable little movie - along with the historical record - doesn't make men on either side of the aisle look spectacular. (I was bored by "Confirmation," but Greg Kinnear's impression of Joe Biden alone makes it worth watching.)

And in any case, the idea that "Confirmation," a generally inert movie, is going to damage the Republican Party in this of all election cycles is truly hilarious. The party should long for "Confirmation's" version of retired senator John Danforth (Bill Irwin), accurately portrayed here as a defender of efforts to impugn Hill's mental health, as its standard-bearer given the alternatives that are available today.

But if "Confirmation" is as mild-mannered and well-meaning as "Anita," a 2013 documentary about Hill that described her as an accidental activist, it does one thing that good art is supposed to do. Alison Wright's powerful performance as Virginia Thomas does something unsettling: It makes me feel sorry for Clarence Thomas' wife.

"Anita" begins with one of the more politically bizarre incidents of 2010, a voice mail Virginia Thomas left for Hill in which Thomas began by offering an "olive branch" and ended with Thomas asking Hill to apologize for "what you did with my husband." At the time, Thomas' voice mail was endlessly scrutinized. Was she asking Hill to retract her claims that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her? Did she believe that Hill and her husband had conducted some sort of consensual affair? Underlying all of it of course was the question we always wish we could ask of women, including Hillary Clinton, whose husbands are accused of sexual misconduct: What does she think happened, and why does she stay?

"Confirmation" wisely doesn't revisit that 2010 voice mail or try to theorize some sort of agreement between the Thomases about what happened between Clarence Thomas and Hill. What it does do instead is allow Wright to give a smart and subtle performance of a woman making a choice, and then reckoning with what that choice is going to cost her.

Part of what makes Wright's casting as Virginia Thomas brilliant is her work on "The Americans," FX's Cold War drama about a married couple who happen to be deep-cover Soviet spies. In that series, Wright plays Martha, an FBI secretary who falls in love with a man who calls himself Clark (Matthew Rhys), and who she believes to be a top-level U.S. government agent, but in fact is a KGB operative. Watching Martha recognize first that Clark is not who he says he is, and then just how trapped she has allowed herself to become in pursuit of a fantasy, is a master class.

Virginia Thomas' plight is not Martha's, of course; Clarence Thomas is an associate justice of the Supreme Court, rather than a Soviet agent. But what passes between her and Thomas is no less formative.

"A former employee, someone I hired, mentored, told the FBI that I was inappropriate with her," Clarence tells Virginia. Her response is not simply to affirm his version of events, but to shade Hill's story in even higher and more sinister relief. "Maybe someone is putting her up to this. There are a lot of groups out there that can't stand the idea of you on the court. They can't beat you honorably," Virginia tells him. "Thank goodness the FBI is on it. They will see it for what it is. It's political nonsense."

Many of the most compelling moments in the rest of the movie involve watching Wright's face as Virginia comes to terms with the consequences of the narrative she has committed herself to. She watches Hill's news conference when Clarence refuses to, even though it might help him prepare for his testimony. She listens quietly as her husband suggests that no white man, particularly no Kennedy, would have to respond to allegations like Hill's.

She lets him vent about the pain of discussion of the allegations with her son. And Virginia watches the final vote on Clarence's nomination when he cannot, delivering the good news to him. And though he earns the seat he wanted so badly, the faces of Wright and Pierce are those of people who have achieved the goal of a lifetime, only to find that the terms of their new existence are not what they imagined. Their smiles are fleeting.

Part of what is so powerful between Clarence and Virginia is everything between them that can't be spoken aloud. Virginia doesn't ask her husband what might have passed between him and Hill; they don't talk about what it means that he is black and she is white, that she possesses some of the privilege he rages about being denied; they don't talk about whatever gap might exist between Hill's portrayal of Thomas' sexual braggadocio and appetites and their own intimate life.

But they don't really have to. If "Confirmation" is the story of how Hill lost the short-term battle over Clarence Thomas' nomination but helped win the long war for women's equality, it's also the story of how Virginia Thomas entered a particular and inextricable circle of wifely hell.

Calling Hill up almost two decades after the hearings and asking her to apologize for a transgression Virginia Thomas still doesn't seem to be able to name may have been an absurd act. But what else is Thomas supposed to do? Stay with her husband and feel unable to defend him? Leave her marriage and ignite a political firestorm that is no more likely to settle the matter than Clarence Thomas' confirmation did?

Until wives are no longer their husbands' keepers, women like Virginia Thomas and Hillary Clinton will be caught in an impossible bind.

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