Director: Ava DuVernay
Stars: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Niecy Nash, Emily Yancy
The cinema of Ava DuVernay is consistently earnest, often openly sentimental, and it makes no apologies for these aspects. They are her brio, her methods of expression and conversation with us. At its very best her work bursts forth with absolute power and confidence. 2014’s Selma ought to have been a Best Picture winner. Her powerhouse 2019 Netflix miniseries When They See Us is among the jewels on that platform and a shattering watch. And her early indies are scaled whirlpools of feeling. Emotion is something she has never shied away from and it swims around and through her latest feature, Origin, a docudrama-cum-biopic of Isabel Wilkerson’s efforts to wrangle sense out of the breadth of American racism… as it reflects in both the Holocaust of the Jews in Nazi Germany and the suppression of the Dalit in India.
Wilkerson’s thesis is a sizeable, multifaceted and contextually complex set of notions, here triggered by news reports of Trayvon Martin’s senseless murder by a Latino vigilante (itself a recognisable influence on the opening of Jordan Peele’s zeitgeist-bating debut Get Out), which somewhat cryptically opens the picture. Isabel (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), invited to write on the crime, wrestles with listening to the 911 calls of Martin’s murder in the midst of a series of personal tragedies, including the sudden death of her beloved husband Brett (Jon Bernthal). DuVernay positions Wilkerson’s subsequent cross-continental research as a stabilising quest; a rod to put her back up against in the aftermath of such loss. In the process she makes connections between the individual and the collective, a span as far-sweeping as Isabel Wilkerson’s own suppositions.
Origin is a film about grappling with ideas as they form, about the reach to unify but not over-simplify. It is about the intent to further and question our thinking. Isabel Wilkerson’s investigations pertaining to caste were not met with immediate kindness. Her credibility was questioned. This film amplifies the internal process of creating critically. It externalises the processes of shuffling and sorting ideas, the narrowing and defining of Isabel Wilkerson’s notions.
It is perhaps fitting, then, that DuVernay’s film itself feels stitched, patchworked, gathered, assembled. The shooting style feels less precious than that found in some of her more recent work. She favours handheld here, and natural light. Vérité nimbleness. Origin is suggestive of a low-budget passion project. It feels like her INLAND EMPIRE in this aspect alone. Labyrinthine and personal. Shoestring but ambitious. These processes feel kindred to the spirit of Wilkerson’s inquisition. The narrative breadth is bold, taking in period asides to Nazi Germany, as well as a significant contemporary trip to Delhi, all in pursuit of a wider interpretation of systematic dehumanisation, and a common language beyond the unhelpfully broad definitions of “racism”. An investigation of caste.
If Origin sounds more like an essay film than a conventional narrative experience, that’s somewhat true. It’s a sprawling, articulate, intellectual excursion, one that veers dangerously close to verbose elitism. DuVernay risks alienating swathes of her potential audience by going full-plunge into this studious adaptation of a non-fiction work, but goes at it with the kind of confidence one needs to take such gambits. And said confidence – whether you find it misguided or not – is the glue that holds this project together where it might otherwise have cascaded out of her reach like a slipping house of cards. Closer in spirit to her documentary on the American prison system 13th than her dramatisation of Selma, Origin sits somewhat awkwardly between them on a spectrum. Well-meaning, strained, ungainly but impassioned.
It hasn’t quite the elegance some may have come to expect from DuVernay, but the effort is as earnest as ever, and that in itself is both rewarding and moving.
The Lost Highway Hotel 