Review
  • David Oyelowo
  • Cinematography
  • Writing
3

Summary

Release Date: January 9, 2015

Director: Ava DuVernay

Writer: Paul Webb

Stars: David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Tom Wilkinson, Tim Roth

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Sending
User Review
0 (0 votes)

In Selma, director Ava DuVernay and writer Paul Webb have given parents and history teachers a valuable tool to bring a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights movement to life. The duo should be commended for their efforts to bring the story of the 1965 march from Selma Montgomery, Alabama in order to secure voting rights for black citizens to to the big screen.

Still, while they’ve given us a concise cinematic version of this important historical milestone, I can’t in good conscience say they’ve given us a good movie. An important one, sure. But on a purely technical or entertainment level, it’s not a particularly great film.

There are great things about it. First and foremost is David Oyelowo’s riveting performance as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Oyelowo accomplishes the difficult task of capturing King’s presence and gift for oratory without resorting to a caricature of the man. His version of King is a brilliant strategist, a captivating speaker and a vulnerable husband and father putting the needs of the masses over his own safety.

Disappointingly, the film was unable to secure the rights to use King’s actual speeches. (King’s family owns the copyright and has chosen to option them to Dreamworks so that Steven Spielberg can some day make a film about him.) So Webb must instead paraphrase the iconic speeches in order to give Oyelowo generic, copyright-free versions of them, which isn’t as satisfying as hearing the original words.

Selma does its best to work around this problem, limiting how much we see of King speaking publicly. It attempts to fill in the gaps with behind-the-scenes moments where King is either relaxing and strategizing with collaborators and loved ones or meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) in hopes of talking the President into signing legislation to remove the insurmountable obstacles imposed by white administrators blocking black voters from registering.

selma-poster

It’s in these quieter, behind-the-scenes moments the film flounders. Many of these scenes seem heavy-handed or clunky. They don’t feel like actual conversations people have. Instead they feel more like inorganic ways to dump information the filmmakers would like the audience to have.

And, as many historical critics have pointed out, the film unfairly portrays LBJ as an antagonist to King, when is reality he was “a key ally for King.” (In a recorded real-life telephone conversation between LBJ and King, Johnson advises, “If you could, find the worst condition that you run into and get it on the radio and get it on television, get it every place you can. Pretty soon the fellow that didn’t do anything but follow, drive a tractor, he’ll say, ‘Well that’s not right. That’s not fair.'”)

This seems like an unfair and lazy way to drum up conflict in a story that is already dramatic enough and has enough villains. Gov. George Wallace (Tim Roth) and his men are certainly worthy antagonists. You don’t need LBJ dropping the n-word behind closed doors or ordering FBI surveillance on King in order to keep him in check to make the film interesting. (King’s aide Andrew Young, who is played by André Holland in the film, said it was Robert Kennedy, not LBJ, who signed the order to wiretap King. He further added, “We could not have had this bill without LBJ, but LBJ could not have passed it without Martin Luther King. It’s unfair for anybody to talk about credit. Too many people gave their lives. Too many people risked too much.”) It would have been more interesting to present a more nuanced LBJ who was an ally of King, yet had his own political and personal reasons for wanting to put voting rights on the back burner.

The film is at its best when it portrays the public confrontations between George Wallace’s police force and King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). These scenes feel suitably dramatic and tense and DuVernay, to her credit, doesn’t shy away from depicting the violence.

Selma as a whole is wonderfully stylized. It’s a very beautifully composed and shot film. Cinematographer Bradford Young gives the film a rich, Kodachrome-inspired look to make it feel dated. He gathered inspiration from photojournalist Paul Fusco’s collection of pictures taken from Robert F. Kennedy’s Funeral Train and from newsreel footage of the time to get the right look.

But while the film is beautiful to look at and features a stellar performance from Oyelowo and a handful of powerful scenes, overall it feels clunky and forced. It’s nice to have a cinematic recreation of the struggle that led to the Voting Right Act of 1965, but Selma is ultimately a film likely to be more remembered for its historical importance than it’s actual quality.

selma1

Written by Joel Murphy. If you enjoy his reviews, he also writes a weekly pop culture column called Murphy’s Law, which you can find here. You can contact Joel at murphyslaw@hobotrashcan.com.