Selma.

Review #1646: Selma.

Cast: 
David Oyelowo (Martin Luther King, Jr), Tom Wilkinson (Lyndon B. Johnson), Carmen Ejogo (Coretta Scott King), André Holland (Andrew Young), Tessa Thompson (Diane Nash), Giovanni Ribisi (Lee C. White), Lorraine Toussaint (Amelia Boynton Robinson), Stephan James (John Lewis), Wendell Pierce (Hosea Williams), Common (James Bevel), Alessandro Nivola (John Doar), Lakeith Stanfield (Jimmie Lee Jackson), Cuba Gooding Jr. (Fred Gray), Dylan Baker (J. Edgar Hoover), Tim Roth (George Wallace), Oprah Winfrey (Annie Lee Cooper), Ruben Santiago-Hudson (Bayard Rustin), Niecy Nash (Richie Jean Jackson), Colman Domingo (Ralph Abernathy), Omar Dorsey (James Orange), Ledisi Young (Mahalia Jackson), and Trai Byers (James Forman) Directed by Ava DuVernay.

Review: 
"You know, the thing that I was really interested in doing with the film is making King more than a catch phrase, more than a holiday, more than a street name in a black neighborhood, more than a stamp, more than one speech. I mean, I wanted him to be a man, a living, breathing man."

It's interesting to find a new voice for film, particularly when it comes to ones that took their time to march forward with their own stories to tell. Ava DuVernay grew up in California, but during her summer vacations, she would travel down to her father's childhood home in Alabama, near the city of Selma. The experiences spent with her father, who had seen the marches from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, would prove a lasting influence. She studied at the University of California, Los Angeles in English literature and African-American studies, but her first career interest was in journalism. It was not long before she shifted into public relations, for which she would work in for a few years. She made her first venture into film with a 2005 short (Saturday Night Life) before making her first documentary with This Is the Life (2008) and her first theatrical effort with I Will Follow (2010). The film was written originally by Paul Webb, although DuVernay would do uncredited re-writes during production. The original director in mind was Lee Daniels, with Oyelowo (who starred in DuVernay's second film, Middle of Nowhere) having to lobby for years to be considered as star, with intentions of casting Liam Neeson and Robert De Niro as Johnson and Wallace before DuVernay came in.

At any rate, what we have here is a fairly stirring film. It runs on the energy to stir emotion about a story it wants to tell involving a march for freedom that came not from one man but from many that came from various backgrounds with their own parts to play. It is pressure that matters most here, one that shows the drive for the vote as a collective. It is the fury of being counted after years of being stepped on that viewers will likely see through the lens of the present alongside the past, where literacy tests fading away don't mean an easy aftermath. If the accuracy is to be debated, at least one can't say the film doesn't have the vision to look like a crisp period piece, right down to shooting on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Oyelowo manages to step forward and does well with strength for a tough task at hand with making King out to be more than just an icon heard on old tapes. He carries the film along with calm measured patience, one who we can see as the main face of a movement with no long doubt or thinking of him as just the entire landscape. In other words, what we have is someone with aspirations to go with flaws just like someone you would know without being relegated to biopic sticking points. Wilkinson does just as well on the other side of the film's line of focus, having his own presence of immeasurability, one that mixes with Oyelowo in the struggle for the right to have others be heard going through the game of policy. Ejogo goes well for her part in soothing measurability in time usually spent paired with Oyelowo, a pillar of strength in her own ways that fits well for the first portrayal of C. King on film (Ejogo had played the role 13 years prior in a production for HBO in Boycott, which dealt with the Montgomery bus boycott). Others stick out in their own ways, such as a persevering Holland or with James. Appearances by Stanfield and Roth stay with the viewer after they leave the screen, for varying reasons.

The strange thing that arises from the dialogue might be the fact that I did not realize that King's speeches were actually under copyright, for which that meant the script had to dance around that with re-spinning of dialogue (Dreamworks and Warner Bros at the time had been given a license for those speeches for a biopic...in 2009, and a decade has passed with no biopic). As one might expect from a historical film, there was a bit of wringing with some of its aspects in depicting certain moments, with the debate being discussed probably just as much as the lack of award nominations for the film as a whole. With a moment like Selma that still had some of the players (both in the march and less connected) still alive, this is particularly interesting, such as the statement from Andrew Young, who stated that most of the film was true while having quibbles with the portrayal of the relationship between Johnson and King. Consider the statement made by DuVernay, who felt that she is a storyteller, not a historian when it comes to a film that isn't a documentary. Honestly, sometimes a film can still be great even if it isn't 100% to the point, such as the case with Malcolm X (1992), which had its own omissions and composites within artistic license (Lee's vision of Malcolm X might as well correspond to a statement DuVernay made involving history being interpreted though the lens of one who reads or experiences it). Quibbles over the portrayal of civil rights moments is nothing new, as noted with films such as Mississippi Burning (1988), for example. But hey, does it count for the film if it speaks to things about King's life that I didn't know beforehand (such as Mahalia Jackson being called by him to sing to him)? Maybe it is an indictment of what we know and don't know from studies in school when it comes to folks like James Reeb or with Jimmie Lee Jackson. There may be many Bloody Sundays, but that doesn't mean it is easily forgotten, particularly when it is one that can be seen on your screen with your own eyes. In that sense, the film does fairly well for itself in generating tension and deep curiosity for the events of 1965 in what happened then and what has happened since then, one that organizes itself with flourish in 128 minutes of events and pace that mostly hits the mark. It isn't a perfect film, but it still manages to do well enough for itself in gripping entertainment to pull a punch where it is still needed now.

Next Time: Closing time comes for Black History Month on the movie side, for which we end with Fences.

Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.