135. Selma

Song - Pride (In the Name of Love) (U2)

Movie: Selma (Ava DuVernay, 2014)

There may be no better evidence of institutional racism in Hollywood than the the fact that it took until 2014 for a major film about Martin Luther King to get made. Even taking his importance aside, his life has more obvious cinematic potential than, say, Shakespeare's or Mozart's. Marches, big speeches, tactical manouvers, large gatherings and peaceful resistance to violence are things that are much easier to dynamically visualise and dramatise than writing a book or composing. Ava DuVernay obviously understands this and is very smart to mostly focus Selma on marches, big speeches, large gatherings, tactical manouvers and peaceful resistance to violence. And so this is a superior biopic that is at its weakest when it veers away from those things, such as during the scenes between MLK (David Oyelowo) and his wife Coretta. Aside from one scene between her and Malcolm X, Coretta is mostly portrayed as the kind of suffering wife of great men under pressure we've seen in countless of films and strangely enough the rest of the women don't fare much better. Diane Nash is presented as a "female agitator", but barely does any agitating. We mostly see her in the background while others make big plans. 

To be fair, there is a good reason why Nash and other relevant interesting figures close to King don't quite stand out here. The film wants to show that the Civil Rights Movement was so successful, because it was a collective movement filled with individuals who were willing to sacrifice for the common good - Selma focuses on their attempts to end voting restrictions for black people. DuVernay goes to great lengths to emphasise that even Martin Luther King himself is not bigger than the movement, that he is not more special than the other activists and that he is a fallible human being with doubts. King is even missing in action (as he was in reality) in the most famous and (justly) celebrated scene of the film; the first march to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a fantastically directed and edited action sequence, slowly ratcheting up tension and revealing the full danger of the situation until it all blows up. It's also one of the most slyly subversive sequences in the film. One of the ways in which DuVernay builds tension, is by letting a white New York Times journalist narrate the events on the bridge on the phone to his editor. He is clearly a good, decent 'liberal', on the side of the protesters, but while they put their bodies on the line, ending up lost and hurt in the chaos, he watches from far away and narrates the events as if he is an objective observer watching a stage show. It's a much more uncomfortable sight than the somewhat caricaturist portrayal of George Wallace, the racist governor of Alabama.

Selma could have probably had more similarly uncomfortable moments, but it sometimes seems that DuVernay holds back and that she knows exactly how far she can go before upsetting the higher powers - this is I think even more obvious in her Netflix miniseries When They See Us. Yet, that is not to say that this film panders to a romanticized version of King and the Civil Rights Movement. For every success it shows, it emphasises how much more work needs to be done. The film starts with King receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, and while giving his speech the film cuts to young black girls descending the stairs in a church, when suddenly a bomb (by the KKK; the scene depicts the real bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama) goes off, killing them all. And, when at the end of the film Lyndon Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, the film doesn't leave you with any illussions that racism has now ended. The act is not passed because Johnson and co had a change of heart regarding racism. There are no benevolent white saviors here and all the racist characters at the beginning of the film are equally racist at the end of the film. It's just that racism has become somewhat less profitable, because of a series of smart, tactical moves made by King and his allies. 

Finally, it's worth getting back to the point about 'agitator' Diane Nash. She is here played by Tessa Thompson. Other characters are played by Andre Holland,  Lakeith Stanfield, and Colman Domingo and Stephan James (both of them spectacularly good in If Beale Street Could Talk). While it is admirable to emphasise the collectivity of the Civil Rights Movement, there are ways to do that which would put a bigger spotlight on this unbelievable collection of great actors.