Skip to main content
Which is not to say DuVernay has made a middling movie that merely chanced upon the right time to address our national nightmare. Events in Ferguson and New York City are only the most recent developments in an ongoing white supremacist campaign to consolidate power and exercise control, and Selma would have resonated one year or 10 years or 40 years ago. And while it is difficult to watch the film without reflecting on the royally fucked state of our nation at the moment, it is equally difficult to ignore the simple fact of DuVernay's filmmaking talent. Selma is not only a vital missive. It is also expertly crafted entertainment.
The film begins with a quiet moment of domestic dilly-dallying, as Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo) fiddles with an ascot and gripes to Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo) about how the public might interpret such fanciness. While DuVernay returns to such pensive stretches throughout Selma, her film is not overly concerned with digging into the private lives of King and his circle. Oyelowo is unbelievably great as King, but DuVernay manages to embed his brilliant embodiment of a brilliant man in a project far more ambitious than run-of-the-mill hagiography. She's mostly intent on examining the nature of collective action, and when her canvas expands to include King's fellow activists (and enemies and doubters and reluctant followers), Selma truly sings.
There is plenty of inspirational uplift in the depiction of the Alabama civil rights marches that eventually led a lagging LBJ to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but the film works best as a study of the horrible violence that forced people to pay attention to the struggle. DuVernay presents King as a master craftsman with an instinct for charged moments that speak louder than his own carefully wrought words. She shares his skill for staging: Violence here is never aestheticized for its own sake, but brought to life so that we might understand its escalation and impact. The sudden blast that kills happy girls in church, the sneering disdain of a thuggish cop as he waits for an excuse to swing, the deep breath preceding an act of defiance that is sure to bring a beating—Selma magnifies these moments to subvert the notion that the civil rights movement represented some monolithic, autonomic historical force whose time had simply come. Instead, the film gives us tense, gripping seconds lived by human beings who are proud, terrified, strong, weak, brave, horrible, evil. It is transfixing, but not easy to watch. And it should not be easy to watch.
DuVernay isn't quite so successful when she retreats from the frontline to visit King as he strategizes with his comrades and goes toe to toe with LBJ, but as dry as these didactic chunks of information are, they are necessary to our understanding of what's at stake when men, women and children stare down a police force, a government, a nation. And those men, women and children can watch Selma and feel proud. And those who are still fighting can watch Selma and feel proud. The rest of us-—the ones who only watch, who benefit from inaction while thrilling to staged history—should leave the theater feeling awed, but also sheepish, and maybe even ashamed. We should thank Ava DuVernay for that.
Critic's Grade: A-
SEE IT: Selma is rated PG-13. It opens Friday at Hollywood Theatre, Lloyd Center, Eastport, Clackamas, Cedar Hills, Division, Bridgeport.
WWeek 2015