Selma

Or: Going to Meet the Man

There are few things more beautiful that a work of art that is both well crafted and timely. Just as we needed Nunn’s Nicholas Nickleby in 1980, and Kauffman’s The Laramie Project in 2000, so we need Ava DuVernay’s Selma to come marching in on the heels of 2014. Like the moment it documents, the film’s triumph is due not to a few courageous and talented individuals, but to many thousands of willing spirits who lend their all to getting, in latter’s case A Story, in the former’s History, right.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo), fresh from reciving the Noble Peace Prize returns to the United States to find black innocents dying in increasingly heinous acts of terror. Despite the wishes of his sometime ally President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) and his wife, Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo), King pushes forward with non-violently demanding the end to voting restrictions which prevent African Americans from exercising their right as free citizens and giving them a hope of changing the laws of the country to suit their needs. Threatened by the forces of Governor Wallace (Tom Roth), and stalked by the FBI, King knows the fight will be long, and doubtless bloody, but rallies his friends and allies to where the eyes of the world will soon be fixed: Selma, Alabama.

I’ve heard Selma paired with Spielberg's Lincoln but find it shares more blood, more emotional weight and storytelling savvy, with Iron Jawed Angles, the chronicle of Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and the Women’s Suffrage Movement. The script of the two films understands their story and their history in minute details. The complicated and oft times conflicting goals of the many groups under King’s banner, the insidiousness of the powers arrayed against them, and the many different voices of all involved are deftly painted in Paul Webb’s script; without once being obvious or prescriptive or vainglorious.

Visually, DuVernay and her cinematographer Bradford Young have created a bold and versatile film. In addition to being authentically from the sixties in ever color pop and light sheen, we flow from dimly lit profiles locked in deep conversation, to bright and buzzing and humorous scenes of the great minds of their generation eating bacon and playing with kids, to an epic and saturated view of the marches, to a blistering and bloody violence that illicit a shock most horror films can only dream of.

Rather than focusing on King alone, we are treated to first rate performances of quiet humor and stoic determination by Andre Holland as Andrew Young, Wendell Pierce as Hosea Williams, Oprah Winfrey asAnnie Lee Cooper and Stephen James as John Lewis. Both Ejogo and Oyelowo have a detached air: of persons focusing on the present problem while their mind is filled with people and troubles miles away: Ejogo’s Coretta bears herself as a woman living amid war, expecting to meet grief around every corner and knowing she’ll meet with dignity. It is when her family is threatened that strain of remaining so vigilant, so long come dribbling forth in highly controlled streams. Oyelowo’s King sinks into himself, his speech is the slow measure of a man who knows the power of words and checks his own carefully. But set him at the podium and (you can see it, on screen, it’s incredible) the steam build up and the fire rise and the oratory come flowing through him, leaving his audience, in the church and the theater both, deeply moved.

I have never been in film before were all around me my neighbors: persons of all complexions, ages, and backgrounds have not only cheered the ending of the film, but a dozen internal lines as well. We knew the history, but DuVerney kept surprising us, bringing forward the urgency of the moment and held up for us to see that while wickedness that still takes so many lives hasn’t gone away, neither has the goodness and courage to stand up against it. I dub Selma a must see picture, worthy in both its artistic merit and it’s moral integrity.