Review: Its good. Snip: The script, in its original form, was drafted by an English screenwriter, Paul Webb, in 2007. Then it floated for years. Oyelowo always wanted to play King, and, at various times, such directors as Michael Mann, Stephen Frears, Paul Haggis, Spike Lee, and Lee Daniels were interested in the project, which fell apart for lack of sufficient funding. During that time, DuVernay, now forty-two, was working as a film publicist and marketer in Los Angeles. As late as 2011, even after she had directed a feature (“I Will Follow”), she was still a unit publicist (on “The Help”). Oyelowo, who had starred in her 2012 feature, “Middle of Nowhere,” kept advocating on her behalf. Pathé U.K. finally put up the money, with assistance from producers including Brad Pitt and Oprah Winfrey, and Paramount took over distribution. That a female African-American director was the person finally able to tackle this subject (on a budget of just twenty million dollars) is important, but it’s secondary to the fact that DuVernay has made a very good movie. Like “Lincoln,” it avoids the lifetime-highlights tendency of standard bio-pics and concentrates instead on a convulsive political process within a fraught period. The compression forces her to capture an entire movement—its gravity, its moralism, its tactical shrewdness—in three marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma. King’s greatest mastery, as DuVernay shows (she rewrote the script), lay in his resourcefulness and in the way he dominated logistical strategy sessions, primarily with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. (The men’s appearance, in their sombre dark suits, white shirts, black ties, and hats, was as dramatically effective as any created by revolutionaries anywhere.) In several key scenes, King faces down James Forman and John Lewis, the young leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who were already working in Alabama and initially rejected the S.C.L.C. as interlopers. In one of the few weaknesses in the movie, the actors cast as Lewis (Stephan James) and Forman (Trai Byers) come off as generic angry young men rather than as individuals. King soothes and inflames them at the same time. This is cinema, more rhetorical, spectacular, and stirring than cable-TV drama: again and again, DuVernay’s camera (Bradford Young did the cinematography) tracks behind characters as they march, or gentles toward them as they approach, receiving them with a friendly hand. At one point during the first march, the camera slowly rises and peers over a massive beam on the Edmund Pettus Bridge as hundreds of people advance across it. When Alabama state troopers release tear gas and charge on horseback, attacking the marchers with clubs and whips, the screen goes white from the gas, as if shrouded in terror, and the camera hurtles past marchers scrambling to get off the bridge. Many are injured, including the activist Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey). The episode, which took place on March 7, 1965—Bloody Sunday—invokes the tumultuous crowd scenes from silent Soviet classics by Eisenstein and Pudovkin. During the clashes in the White House, however, DuVernay lets the words and the actors carry the meaning. The reliably impressive Tom Wilkinson recalls, without the slightest exaggeration, L.B.J.’s looming head and neck, his heavy hands, his easy way with profanity. The icy confrontation between Johnson and Wallace—whom Roth plays as sarcastic and wily, with a lizard smile—is a minor classic in itself. Historical irony abounds in bio-pic land: our unique American heritage exists onscreen courtesy of talented British actors. DuVernay’s timing couldn’t be more relevant. Next year marks the fiftieth anniversary of both the Selma marches and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court overturned a key provision of the act last year, and Republican legislatures across the country have been deploying new voter-I.D. laws. Faced with all that—and with the recent turmoil in Ferguson, Cleveland, and New York—King would have noticed how far we have yet to go, shaken his head, and set to work.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 22:50:57 +0000