Ava DuVernay (2014)

The Civil Rights Act, signed into law by Lyndon B Johnson in 1964, desegregated the American South but racial discrimination persisted flagrantly in some states.  As a result, very many blacks were prevented from registering to vote.  Alabama was one such state and, in early 1965, the city of Selma became the focus of protests.  These were led by Martin Luther King Jr who, at the same time, was urging Johnson to pass additional voting rights legislation immediately, in order to put an end to the abuse of the new civil rights law.  The protests culminated in marches from Selma to Montgomery, in March 1965, and the President’s taking before a Joint Session of Congress a bill to eliminate restrictions on voting.   The Voting Rights Act was signed into law by Johnson in August 1965.  Like Lincoln (2012), Selma concentrates on a single, especially important episode in the life of its heroic protagonist, as a means of exploring his personality and honouring his memory.  Like Steven Spielberg’s film, Ava DuVernay’s raises – both in prospect and in retrospect – the question:  how do you treat this kind of material in a way that delivers a drama rather than a history lesson?   This is only the third feature made by DuVernay (the first was a documentary) but the challenge of balancing history and drama in Selma is greater than the one that confronted the vastly experienced Spielberg.  He concentrated, to a large extent, on Abraham Lincoln’s behind-closed-doors political negotiations to enable passage through the House of Representatives of a bill to abolish slavery:  the on-screen evidence of slavery and its effects was rationed.  DuVernay can hardly avoid showing racism and racial violence in action; and there’s little scope for nuance or ambiguity, for suggesting that the white supremacist cast of mind had anything to recommend it.  I’m not sure, therefore, how DuVernay could have avoided Selma becoming the unsatisfying historical drama that I think it is.

Until its rousing finale, this is an odd film to watch.  My feelings of increasing boredom – the result of a lack of narrative imagination and of probing characterisation – were punctuated by bursts of fury at the words and deeds of the white racists.  Working from a screenplay originated by Paul Webb, DuVernay includes several sequences in which Martin Luther King, his colleagues in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and others (notably John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) debate campaign principles and tactics.  These sequences throw up some interesting points – for example, the suggestion that the movement’s policy of non-violence was founded on a mixture of ethics and pragmatic understanding of the best way of staying alive (‘For every two of them we killed, they’d kill ten of us’).  All these discussions, and the sequences that describe the action resulting from them, have, however, the quality of dramatised reconstruction.  They made me feel I’d rather have been watching a straight documentary (like the 2013 television documentary Martin Luther King and the March on Washington).  Late on in Selma, Ava DuVernay cuts to black-and-white newsreel of the actual march.  It’s always risky doing this (particularly during a film rather than over the closing titles).  Seeing the real thing confirms your suspicions that DuVernay’s marchers are too neatly choreographed:  she gives the viewer insufficient sense not only of untidy breaks in the massed ranks but also of what’s going on along the roadside, at the margins of the march.  She also shows an occasional tendency to aestheticise – to counterproductive effect.  A shocking moment at the start of Selma, when a bomb explosion kills black children, is diluted by the extended follow-up as Bradford Young’s camera describes the slow-motion after-effects of the outrage, almost beautifying the revolving debris.

Selma, as well as becoming the epicentre of concerns about the lack of diversity of this year’s Oscar nominees, has been very enthusiastically received by critics.  It has been suggested, though, that DuVernay has revised Paul Webb’s script to turn LBJ (the main character in Webb’s script originally, according to Wikipedia) into a reformer much more reluctant than he actually was.  DuVernay, in response to criticisms of this kind, has been quoted as saying that, ‘I’m not a historian. I’m a storyteller’.  She looks to have been selective about when to put on her storytelling hat although, if she’s rewritten history so that the events in Selma coincide with a crisis in Martin Luther King’s marriage, this is quite a welcome adjustment.   As in Lincoln, the coverage of the main character’s family life is one of the more involving aspects of the story – because it suggests an arena in which the hero isn’t fully in control and able always to have the last calm, unanswerable word.  When Coretta Scott King, unhappy with his extra-marital dalliances, asks her husband to tell her straight if he loves her and warns him before he answers, ‘I’m not a fool’, he promptly says yes.   But she throws him with her follow-up question:  ‘Do you love any of the others?’  After a long pause, he utters an unconvincing no.  This exchange is water in the desert in the dramatic landscape of Selma.

As Martin Luther King, David Oyelowo shows great intelligence and control – perhaps too much of the latter.  He mimics King’s voice patterns so carefully that the mimicry is sometimes most of what you get, at the expense of rhythm and sense.  There isn’t enough to give his public speaking momentum or to make you feel that King’s listeners are swept up by the words and the rhetorical music of what he’s saying.  Oyelowo lets rip in his final piece of oration and the effect is powerfully moving but it’s as if he and Ava DuVernay, realising the importance of a big finish, hold back until then.  There are no shortcomings in Oyelowo’s use of his face and body, though, and he’s brilliant at expressing the moments when King’s blood boils but he knows he must internalise his anger.  David Oyelowo’s recent Radio Times interview, in which he said he had to move from Britain to the US for the sake of his career, has understandably attracted comment and raised alarm.  The dominance of British actors – black and white – in key roles in Selma is puzzling in a different way. Coretta Scott King, Johnson and Governor George Wallace are played, respectively, by Carmen Ejogo, Tom Wilkinson and Tim Roth.  All three are good enough but the casting of Wilkinson and Roth is particularly curious.  With their matching hairstyles and large ears and noses, they look weirdly similar – Roth is a kind of homuncular version of Wilkinson.  (If Ava DuVernay means to suggest that Johnson and Wallace were kindred spirits, she really is out to travesty LBJ.)

Oprah Winfrey (also one of the film’s producers) plays the civil rights activist Annie Lee Cooper and shows again that she’s a fine actress.  In an early scene, Annie Lee Cooper attempts to register as a voter in Selma and we witness the kind of treatment such attempts met with from racist officials:  Cooper answers the registrar’s questions correctly until he asks for the names of the sixty-seven members of the state judiciary.  As she walks in for this interview, Winfrey’s walk is a poignantly expressive blend of determination and weariness.   Other Americans in the large cast who do well include the rapper Common (as James Bevel), Giovanni Ribisi (one of LBJ’s White House advisers), André Holland (Andrew Young), Wendell Pierce (Hosea Williams), Henry G Sanders (an old man whose son is murdered and who eventually registers as a voter at the age of eighty-four), Alessandro Nivola (John Doar, the Assistant Attorney General), and Martin Sheen (Judge Frank Minis Johnson).

10 February 2015