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| (Paramount) |
Amelia
Boynton (Lourraine Toussaint, beautiful and wonderful) delivers a monologue to
Coretta King (Carmen Ejogo) about the power of their ancestors, who arrived kidnapped on slave-ships, who endured unspeakable cruelties and hardships,
whose blood courses through their veins. The pain of history – as beautifully
articulated in this moment – weighs heavily in this film's events, which are
straightforwardly told by director and writer (she heavily rewrote Paul Webb's original script) DuVernay.
The
tales of ordinary yet crucial actors in the movement lie at the heart of the
film. Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey, natural and powerful) attempts to
register to vote, but she’s denied because she cannot name the 67 county judges
in her area. She recites the preamble yet she’s looked on by the registrar as
an inferior citizen. The humiliation Cooper registers on her face is
heartbreaking. The courage she has to assault an officer is awe-inspiring. “The
n**** lady” is taken down, but not without a fight. MLK consoles Cager Lee (Henry G. Sanders,
great) – the father of the deceased Jimmie Lee Jackson – to the best of his
ability. What words do you tell an 84 year-old man who lost his son in a
peaceful march, an orchestrated act of police brutality? Such an intimate
consolation, which Oyelowo imbues with quiet humanity, metastasizes into a
bodily anguish in the next scene as he extols the necessity of collective
responsibility to his congregation: “That means protest! That means march! That
means disturb the peace! That means jail! That means risk!” If MLK feels
peripheral, its only because he was who he was because of the people around
him, who inspired him to take the pulpit and speak.
We
idolize King, and rightfully so, but this film is interested in the pillars
that support such a forceful and inspirational personality. And it dares to ask
a pertinent question about a man who wields such a moral sway over our
political culture: How can a man – at once a political hero and zealous
preacher - disrespect his wife so greatly? DuVernay's quiet, slow and thoughtful
approach to these bristling scenes draws the viewer in to draw their own
conclusions.
Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo, radiant) played a significant role in maintaining her
husband’s legacy after he was assassinated in 1968. She was instrumental to
keeping King alive. In Selma, the
seeds of who Coretta became are planted.
Dr. King
seeks other avenues to fill his heart – he calls a singer and asks her to fill
him with the holy spirit. He finds solace in other women when he can’t in his
wife. Meanwhile,
Coretta lives in danger and fear. She’s subjected to King’s scrupulous demands
on running a household he is barely in. DuVernay deals with gender in an
interesting way, choosing to show us a Coretta who is neither a victim nor
passive to her husband’s abuses, but rather resilient and determined. Their
confrontations and interactions, her uncompromising approach to the affairs,
force King to re-examine his love and his shortcomings as a man. Coretta
reappears at the end, marching at the front of the line, but this does not
leave MLK off the hook. Rather, it solemnly affirms Coretta’s commitment to her
husband’s vision and his imperfect love. Without Coretta, in other words,
certainly there is no Martin Luther King Jr. She is a pillar, holding
this man up.
Selma manages to
successfully present a stirring and authentic visual template: the somber
grays, browns, blacks, whites, and reds give us a Selma at once modern and
appropriately antiquated. It also reinforces the power of crowds, of
individuals, of protest. A moment is never wasted by DuVernay and acclaimed
cinematographer Bradford Young to give us beautiful tableaux to emphasize their themes.
One striking image: King
looking out at the crowd, hundreds of black men and women kneeling on the
ground, hands on their heads, submissive yet unrelenting. DuVernay’s
responsibility is not with the politicians, but with those brave enough to
plant themselves down on the ground and offer their bodies to the greater cause
of civil rights. It’s the poster for the film, and rightfully so.
Or, another startling visual: the marching towards Edmund Pettus Bridge. They first walk
vertically across the street and then horizontally up the bridge. It evokes an
exodus, even as they’re aware they are walking towards danger and threat.
The
marching culminates in the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge confrontation. Tear
gas is thrown, black bodies are bludgeoned with billy clubs, officers on horses
whip those attempting to get away. The footage taken of these people and played
out on televisions everywhere serves the larger purpose of reaching the world,
of inciting white guilt, of involving more with the struggle for voting rights.
But the sequence – as we see it – is bloody and painful, as inescapable as it
is necessary for the greater cause.
The
portrayal of President Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson, forceful and
effective) has received much criticism for his inaccurate depiction in the
film. But what matters in Selma is DuVernay’s interpretation of what LBJ stood for: he’s not as
much of an obstructionist as he is a shrewd political actor. Whether J. Edgar
Hoover and LBJ meet is not the point – it’s that, under his watch, he let what
happened to King happen. LBJ’s priorities as President loom large in Duvernay’s
visualization of the Selma to Montgomery walk.
Neither
King nor LBJ are the heroes of this film. Without the death of Jimmie Lee
Jackson, King’s inspiration to drive the marches won’t burn as strongly within
him. Without the violence in Selma that LBJ watches on his television, his courage
to confront the shrewd and despicable George Wallace (Tim Roth, brilliantly
conniving) and sign in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 can’t happen either. Selma is not only a study of political
movements and strategies (comparisons to Spielberg’s Lincoln are silly and, frankly, offensive), but also of how community
and intimacy inspire us to act. No doubt the Civil Rights Movement fractured, SNCC
(Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and SCLC (Southern Christian
Leadership Conference) battled it out for the territory of Selma, eventually
reconciled to march, fragmented etc. But such petty and insignificant (at least
now) arguments existed because of what was most tragic: the promises of the
civil rights movement were consistently broken. The responsibility of the
artist is not to get it right necessarily, but to interpret and challenge our
assumptions about the past. LBJ is no hero, MLK was no god.
Selma doesn’t swagger with
the gravitas of most historical dramas about “important” events. DuVernay’s
idiosyncratic vision creates a humanistic perspective on Selma, where villains
and heroes aren’t as easily discernible as we want them to be. Sheriff Jim
Clark (Stan Houston) and George Wallace (Tim Roth) hover over the film as the evil
racists, yet there is a remarkable flourish DuVernay possesses which renders
such evil ideologues as merely cogs in systemic oppression – is there something
to admire in George Wallace, ready to stand on the wrong side of history, while
many waver and tremble, unsure of their own convictions? "The white people leave, they always do,”
resonates because those who we believe as heroes never turn out who we want
them to be.
People
and movements come together and they fall apart as well. The Voting Rights Act
of 1965 is signed yet racism and systemic inequality will persist. DuVernay’s
emphasis on the quiet and domestic allows the movie to avoid the pitfall of “historical
drama”; while heavy, it never wears its heart on its sleeve. Her vision invites
the viewer to explore the history of the Selma marches, of MLK, of John Lewis,
of Amelia Boynton, of Diane Nash – or “the female agitator” as she’s referred
to in the intelligence memorandum. Yet it also invites you to go deeper, to
imagine what love and hate and power meant in 1965, how empathy structured the
debate over civil and still does today.
Selma isn’t content to leave
you with answers – it demands you to ask questions about yourself, about who we
demonize and who we idolize, about our history and, most importantly, where we
are.
Grade: A