It misses the three 1967 films and the criticism and the defense and the complexity of representing more than one person can reasonably represent.
It misses the books and the ambassadorship and the Honorary Oscar and the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the ninety-four years that ended on January 6, 2022.
And it misses the specific detail that Poitier returned to throughout all of those years, in every telling of his story, as the moment when the particular trajectory of his particular life became possible: an elderly Jewish man, a newspaper, an empty restaurant after closing, week after week after week.
He never knew the man’s name. He read pretty good, in the end. And the distance between those two facts — the anonymous gift and the life it helped make possible — is the distance this story is trying to cross.
It never quite does, because distance of that kind never fully closes. The waiter remains unnamed and unthanked. The regret remains real. The gratitude is undischarged.
What we have instead of resolution is the record: Sidney Poitier’s own account, told consistently for six decades, of what an unnamed man gave him in the closing hours of a restaurant in New York sometime around 1944, and what he went on to do with it.
That is the story. It is a true story. And it is, despite its long journey, finally, not so complicated.
An old man noticed a young man struggling. He offered to help. The young man said yes. And everything else followed.