SELMA Movie Review: A Vision For How America Can Work

It is hard to believe in America today. It is hard to believe that the country we call the Land of the Free is the same one where Eric Garner was killed on the street for selling loosie cigarettes. The same one where Tamir Rice, a 12 year old boy, was shot dead for the crime of owning a BB gun. The same one where Mike Brown’s body lay in the street for four hours, his weaponless corpse riddled with police bullets. It’s hard to believe that this nation built on concepts of equality is the same nation where grand juries routinely refuse to indict police officers who, with alarming regularity, kill unarmed black people. It’s hard to look at America and recognize the country we thought we were.

It was hard to believe in America in 1965. Just two years before four little girls had been murdered in a church bombing in Birmingham. Four little black girls, killed by the Ku Klux Klan because their church had been a center of the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. Although Dr. Martin Luther King Jr had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 he would have likely found, in 1965, himself unable to vote in Selma, Alabama. Even though Jim Crow segregation had been ended by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Southern racist system continued to oppress black citizens by any means necessary. The Civil Rights Act had struck down the “Grandfather Clause” (in order to register to vote you had to show that your grandfather had voted - which meant people only a generation or two removed from slavery could not possibly vote, and which meant people whose grandparents had had their votes suppressed by Jim Crow also couldn’t vote) and poll taxes (which kept the poor from voting), literacy tests still barred many black citizens from casting ballots. And these literacy tests weren’t just reading comprehension quizzes - they often took the form of intense exams about the minutia of local government (can you name all the Congress members representing your state? All the county level judges? If not, you may not have been able to vote in Alabama either).

But the reality of America has ever been this. Always. Even the Preamble to the Constitution, with its call to form “a more perfect union,” understands the core imperfection at the heart of the United States of America. This isn’t a nation that was founded, it is a nation that is continuously founding itself. It’s a nation with the tools in place to change even its most sacred underlying documents as time changes all contexts and understandings of freedom, equality and unity. Nobody who ratified the Constitution in 1787 thought they were done, and they understood that the nation they were defining would be, forever, changed by each new generation that came. That is the strength of the United States of America. This is a nation that can adapt.

When things are bad - and they are bad today, and they were bad in 1965 - it can be difficult to remember this. It can be tough to look at a 12 year old black boy bleeding to death in the back of a patrol car, his sister in handcuffs next to him, and remember that this is a nation that can change. After all, what difference is there between the murders of Tamir Rice and Eric Garner and Mike Brown and Ezell Ford and those four little girls in Birmingham? If anything, it seems worse - the KKK killed those four girls, but the killers of these four people, in different states across the union, wore the shield of law enforcement. It seems so much worse right now.

It can get better. It will get better. This week the Mall of America went into an emergency shutdown as protesters - hands up in the air in honor of Mike Brown, chanting “I can’t breathe” in honor of Eric Garner - disrupted holiday shopping. Thousands of others have taken to the streets of America, doing the same thing, refusing to let these murders fade away from the public consciousness. This is the first step in how America makes itself better.

This is how Martin Luther King and the heroes and martyrs of the March on Montgomery in 1965 changed America.

Selma isn’t a biopic of King. It doesn’t tell the sweep of the man’s life, it doesn’t bring us his rise to prominence as a young preacher and his eventual murder by a white man. It tells one story, and that story isn’t even really about Dr. King. He is central to it, but Selma understands the reality of protest movements and profound political change in America - it is not the work of any one person. It is the work of a community that is engaged, a community that is enraged, and a community that is willing to make sacrifices to shape the world into something that better reflects their vision of justice.

Ava DuVernay’s film tells the stories of that community with beautiful emotion and extraordinary drama. Selma is, at times, as much a thriller as it is a history story. It’s a film that alternately moves you to tears while also driving you to the edge of your seat as a brave handful throw their very bodies in the way of clubs, horses and police savagery. It’s a film that explores the sacrifices regular people made, as well as the personal sacrifices Dr. King had to make every day, leaving behind any hope of an ordinary family life to lead people in a crusade he always suspected would be the death of him.

Selma weaves a tapestry of stories - young radical organizers who clash with Dr. King, white clergy who lay down their lives for equality, ordinary black citizens who just want to secure the right to representation that spurred the Founding Father to rebel from England - into a whole that reveals the true challenges of making change, and the compromises it requires. Each of these stories gets their moment, each becoming part of an organic whole that leads to Dr. King standing before the Alabama state house, saying:

"Once more the method of nonviolent resistance was unsheathed from its scabbard, and once again an entire community was mobilized to confront the adversary. And again the brutality of a dying order shrieks across the land. Yet, Selma, Alabama, became a shining moment in the conscience of man. If the worst in American life lurked in its dark street, the best of American instincts arose passionately from across the nation to overcome it."

While Selma is the story of a community that comes together, the center of that community is undoubtedly Dr. King. British actor David Oyelowo is chameleonic in the role, the very shape of his face changed to play the great martyr. Oyelowo captures not just the man’s enormous charisma - his delivery of King’s speeches are fine examples of fiery oratory themselves - but also his fallibility and his exhaustion. Simplistic people demand that our great figures be perfect, and that any vice or deviation is a sign they weren’t great at all. That’s foolish, as all great men are still men, and Dr. King is no exception. Oyelowo is both the loud, decisive leader in public and the wounded, unsure sinner at home, and he imbues both sides of Dr. King’s personality with an honest richness. They come together in one of my favorite scenes in the movie where King, disheartened by the murder of one of the activists, begins to doubt the wisdom of marching from Selma to Montgomery. It’s King’s Gethsemane, and Oyelowo captures the burden of leadership exactly.

As magnificent as Oyelowo is (in that scene and all others), he isn’t exactly the reason why it’s my favorite. That scene, where King struggles with his responsibilities, is the perfect summation of all the film’s thoughts on activism. He is riding with John Lewis, a young organizer who bristles at the slow pace SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) is moving, and King unburdens himself on the younger man. But Lewis does not allow King to wallow, and he feeds back to the reverend his own words, inspiring him to continue on even in the face of overwhelming hate and violence. This is how it works, and even great men need to be propped up, reassured, helped along part of the way.

The film is full of scenes as powerful as that, each anchored by performances that are, on their own, extraordinary. Some of the marquee names that pass through are distracting - Cuba Gooding Jr and Martin Sheen definitely jolt. Other actors shine in their piece of the mosaic, illuminating the whole. Keith Stansfield is remarkable as the martyr Jimmie Lee Jackson, shot dead by a state trooper. Common and Wendell Pierce are extraordinary in support as members of King’s inner circle. Carmen Ejogo is wonderful as Coretta Scott King, a role she has played before, and one that she elevates from just ‘the wife’ into a fully formed human whose support is as crucial to the march as anyone else’s.  Stephan James brings John Lewis’ frustrations - and change of heart - to magnificent life.

But for me the two supporting performances that most bouy Oyelowo’s Oscar-worthy central role are Oprah Winfrey and Tom Wilkinson. Winfrey is Annie Lee Cooper, a woman who is just trying to vote and who gets caught up in all of the struggle and violence that comes from her simple desire to claim the most basic American right. She plays the role with a dignified simplicity and an occasional rage that is all-too understandable. Meanwhile Wilkinson is Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of the most peculiar and fascinating presidents in American history. He’s a man at a crossroads in history, one foot in the racist past and one in the egalitarian future, and he’s the president who made some of the most profound changes - and mistakes -  in modern history. Wilkinson plays him with an affection, and the script by Paul Webb allows LBJ dignity in his politicking. This is a movie that is about the real way change happens, and part of that is the push and pull at the executive level as LBJ tries to balance political reality with the desire for justice.

This is the messy stuff that most films don’t deal with. Most films would present LBJ simply as a roadblock to change, but Selma is smart and nuanced and it understands that the course of history is altered not only by the people at the top but also the people on the streets, and that it’s the interplay between them that creates the energy that powers the change. It’s a big part of why I love this film - it’s so rare to see this sort of big view of history being presented.

I also love the movie as a movie. I’ve spent lots of words going on about the importance and the meaning and the history of Selma, but I would be remiss if I didn’t spend time talking about it as entertainment, which it also is. It’s an absorbing drama and an inspiring story well-told by filmmakers at the height of their craft. DuVernay is working on a budget - expect to see the same intersection pop up more than once in the course of the film - but that doesn’t keep her from bringing scope to the picture. Bradford Young, her cinematographer, plays the film in deep velvety shadows and honey tones that make scenes beautiful snapshots of history but also immersive moments of time we experience. Between Selma and A Most Violent Year Young has established himself as a cinematographer in the realm of the greats, and an heir to the Gordon Willis throne of Prince of Darkness for his use of shadows.

All of it leads to the film’s big scene, the events of Bloody Sunday March the 7th. Hundreds of protesters begin their journey from Selma to Montgomery to protest suppression of the vote by crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge out of town. They are met by cops on horseback and hicks with guns and Confederate flags. What happened next was a sobering display of fascist power as the police attacked the protesters, beating and gassing them, sending rivers of blood down US Highway 80. All of this was captured by television cameras and the press (another vital agent of American change Selma stops to acknowledge), giving the American people an indelible image of racist Southern brutality.

DuVernay shoots Bloody Sunday in a way that would make Spielberg proud, as a sequence of intense impact and even more intense emotion. You want to reach out to the screen to stop the batons from falling, you want to put yourself between the vicious police and the citizens they are brutalizing. It is an extraordinary sequence of immersive, activist cinema. It left me in tears.

Selma is one of the best movies released in 2014; it is easy to write the film off as awards bait, but DuVernay strives for something deeper, something richer. This is a film that isn’t simply about a protest movement fifty years ago, it’s a film about a theory of how America works. And it’s a film that says America does work, when we put the work in. I walked out of Selma believing in this country, even amidst all the horror and tragedy we’ve been experiencing, because Selma helped me remember that sometimes we’re at our best in the face of injustice like this.

When Martin Luther King stood on the state house steps he knew the march was over but the movement would continue. Some of us in the 21st century thought the movement was over, that we had come to the end of the road, but the reality is that it yet stretches on before us. We’re walking the same path that Martin Luther King walked, the path that Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and Harriet Beecher Stowe walked. The path that brought Hiram Revels to the Senate and that led to the doors of Spelman College. It’s the same path on which trod WEB DuBois and Marcus Garvey, and which brought Jackie Robinson to home plate. It’s the path that passes by the graves of Emmett Till and Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins, and it’s the path that is paved with James Meredith’s college enrollment forms. It’s a path that stretches out ahead of us yet, a path that is streaked with the blood and tears of many thousands, and which will see the anguish of many thousands to come. Standing on the state house steps Martin Luther King looked forward to the end of the path, and he told us how long we would have to walk it.
 

"How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."