Watching Origin, the mind-stirring new film from writer-director Ava DuVernay, I found myself leaning forward, the way you do when a friend you haven’t seen in a long time relates an intensely personal tale of loss or love or both. University students no doubt do the same when Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian portrayed in the film by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, stands before them, lecturing. Wilkerson’s 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents became a surprise bestseller during the pandemic. For the unlikely film version, DuVernay, who is skilled in both documentary (13th) and docudrama (Selma, When They See Us), sets out to bring Wilkerson’s ideas to a wide audience by placing the author’s life and the history she unearths side by side. The result is both unwieldy and deeply moving.
Here is a rare and excellent thing — a major dramatic feature about a Black woman intellectual. DuVernay is blessed in Ellis-Taylor, who played the Williams sisters' mother in the tennis drama King Richard. She has a great gift for both elucidating arcane ideas and for filling Wilkerson’s many moments of solitary reflection with resonant meaning. The author suffers a great personal loss just as she’s about to begin her book project. Ellis-Taylor infuses Wilkerson’s intellectual journey with the abiding current of that loss.
In the first of many historical reenactments, DuVernay begins with the February 2012 shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost) by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. It’s a heartbreaking sequence. When a magazine editor (Blair Underwood) asks the film’s Isabel to write about the case, she resists, but after listening to the 911 calls from Zimmerman and a neighbor who heard Martin crying out, she knows she must dig deeper. (The film utilizes the real 911 tapes.)
Isabel is troubled by the terminology we use to describe such events. Zimmerman may have been a racist, but was there something more at work? “Racism as the primary language to understand everything is insufficient,” Isabel tells her editor.
She is fascinated by the story of a German factory worker (Finn Wittrock) in love with a Jewish woman (Victoria Pedretti) who was captured in a photograph crossing his arms and refusing to salute Hitler like the workers around him. In the Nazi structure, Isabel sees an example of the caste system, a social hierarchy rooted in the accepted superiority of one class of people over another.
The most famous such system existed in India, where Dalits, or “untouchables,” have long been made to live in barren poverty while performing the most demeaning of social services. Late in the film, a scene depicting a man toiling deep into a vat of human excrement is juxtaposed against recreations of the Middle Passage of enslaved Africans as well as Jews being separated upon arrival at a concentration camp. This quick collage of harrowing imagery, while familiar to many, feels essential to this moment of a faltering collective memory.
Isabel begins her work by traveling first to Germany, where she stands one night before the shining light of “The Empty Library,” a public memorial to a 1933 book burning by Nazi Party university students, the reenactment of which may reverberate for moviegoers against memories of recent hate marches here in America. In Berlin, she’s shown documents revealing a 1933 meeting of Nazi lawyers who found in American Jim Crow laws all the inspiration they needed to begin preparing German society to accept “the Final Solution.”
The first hour of Origin moves in fits and starts, as if the filmmaker, like Isabel, is finding her way toward a unifying structure. At the film’s midpoint, Isabel attends a family picnic and begins explaining (or over-explaining) her thesis to her loyal cousin Marion (a marvelous Niecy Nash-Betts). “One more time, in English,” Marion says. “A little less Pulitzer Prize.” She continues, “Make it plain,” and as if heeding that call, DuVernay’s storytelling becomes more focused and direct.
It’s in the rich details of the personal that Origin soars. In one beautiful scene, the presence of which seems meant to suggest that the people in our very own lives have a living history worth documenting, Isabel records the remembrance of Miss (Audra McDonald), a longtime friend. Miss’ story of a belittling high school principal contains gratitude toward her father even as its specifics fill her with both pain and anger, a range of emotions that ripple across McDonald’s face all at once. Hers is a brief, classic performance.
Origin is challenging. It requires us to participate, to lean in, to listen. I’ve seen it twice and though I can see that it could be shorter and is sometimes didactic, its rewards are many, not least among them the affecting tenderness with which Isabel and those she loves approach one another. And in a season of good movies, you might be hard pressed to find a sequence as indelible as the final story Isabel is told. It involves a nine-year-old African American baseball player (Lennox Simms) circa 1951, who isn’t allowed to celebrate a championship victory with his white teammates. Like Trayvon Martin and the faces of so many whose histories momentarily intersect with Isabel’s, he’s unforgettable.
Origin
Directed by Ava DuVernay. Written by Ava DuVernay, based on the book by Isabel Wilkerson. Opens January 19.
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