Movie Review: "Selma" (Ava DuVernay, 2014)

A WINDOW TO THE PAST (AND THE PRESENT)

by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

Above: David Oyelowo is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in "Selma"

 

How to review “Selma”?  I’m not sure that I can—at least not in the usual way.  It’s not that I have nothing to say about the film; quite the contrary.  It’s just that the usual things I always mediate on (editing, acting, directing, et cetera) seem almost inconsequential.  Because “Selma” is not a movie that’s meant to be savored as a piece of art.  It is a grim, methodical account of injustice and the fight against racism.  It is a call to action.

             Issuing that call is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo).  Like most of my millennial peers, I grew up studying Dr. King’s famed fight for civil rights in elementary school and hearing sound bites of him crying out “I have a dream” on the radio.  Yet that’s merely a fraction of his achievements.  And what Mr. Oyelowo and writer-director of Ava DuVernay grant us is the complete tapestry—not just Dr. King, but the true scope of the movement that surrounded him. 

When we first see Dr. King in “Selma,” he’s accepting the Nobel Peace Prize and for a moment, all seems well.  But it’s not long before the screen is shattered by a bomb, an agonizingly abrupt explosion that kills several black children.  The fight is not over, the movie reminds us, and Ms. DuVernay soon brings us to the real core of the story—the marches Dr. King lead to secure equal voting rights.

            At times, the battle seems already lost.  Mr. Oyelowo speaks many of his lines in a low, heavy voice; his Dr. King is a man who often sounds sluggish and weary.  He does come alive whenever he addresses a congregation from a church podium, but the fear of violence and the horror of the hatred are never far away.  And even though the film ends with Dr. King crying out to an approving crowd on steps of the Alabama capitol building, the song that rings over the movie’s end credits (“Glory,” performed by Common and John Legend) reminds us that the fight is not over yet. 

            But is it too much to hope that “Selma” could help make things right?  After all, it is a movie that brilliantly rouses your empathy.  Rather than deify Dr. King with the grandeur of sleek showmanship, Ms. DuVernay has created a film that feels stoic, natural, and still.  Even at the beginning, when Dr. King implores Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) to pass a voting rights act, Ms. DuVernay refuses to accompany Mr. Oyelowo’s delivery with a nobly righteous score; she just lets him speak the lines, with nothing but ambient noise behind him.  And the restraint pays off—the subtlety of Ms. DuVernay’s direction is what makes Dr. King’s struggle take hold of us cinematically, reminding us that we can’t sit on the couch with a clean conscience while racism runs rampant.

            So maybe I was wrong; perhaps musings on filmmaking techniques do have a place in this review.  It is, after all, the tools that Ms. DuVernay employs as an artist that make “Selma” as soul-pulling as it is, that make it remind us not that we shall overcome, but as Dr. King says so many times in the movie, that we must.