Dir. by Ava DuVernay. Prod. by Christian Colson, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, and Oprah Winfrey. Cloud Eight Films, Celador Films, Harpo Films, Pathé, and Plan B Entertainment, 2014. 128 mins. (http://www.selmamovie.com)
I watched the damn movie.
I didn’t want to watch it, not in 2015, not now, not when it was black and white news film in 1964. And I was right to not want to, because a couple of the bouts of crying almost became panic attacks. Those faces and clubs and whips invaded my parents’ living room in a tiny town in northwestern Ohio after Birmingham and Kennedy, followed by body counts from Vietnam, Martin in Memphis, the Democrats in Chicago, and Bobby dead on a kitchen floor. To my outraged young heart there was no doubt there were hidden powers who were simply not going to let people get along. It put me in anti-war marches on Washington in 1969 and 1970 and in demonstrations in Ohio till Vietnam was over in 1975. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.
Selma is an excellent movie, holding, according to the reviews, very close to the truth. My own opinion is that the casting was genius; that anyone who knows John Lewis’s face now would believe Stephan James was really him, that André Holland must be Andrew Young with CGI. In a docudrama such as this, intended to tweak memory and remind emotion as well as to inform a younger generation, this works. For baby boomers, this movie was all about immediacy.
Several movie-goers interviewed in the reviews I read mentioned accuracy. This is a comfort in watching any docudrama, because there are no movies without bias, and in historical re-creations it is a constant problem to get a handle on where the producers are coming from, as with any product. We are without doubt where sympathies lie in Selma– it is their story, after all – but to hear repeated confirmation that the story line was not altered to suit was affirming (and saved the work of ferreting out anachronisms or lies on my own).
The same can’t be said of the special effects. I have no problem with a director who does everything she can to make horror real where horror is intended, and the bombing scene leaving one dead baby girl in the wreckage pulled heartstrings as it was intended. This one early-in-the-film gambit, however, was perhaps the only over-the-top representation I found. The brutality of the bridge, the shooting of Jimmy Jackson, the beating to death of the Boston priest could have easily been overplayed into propaganda simply by going on longer, or focusing on the raging faces; but I do not think that they were. I saw the restraint of an attempt at history in the making of this film, and I thank Director DuVernay for that.
What was new to me in this film was the politics. I had only a general kind of understanding that this march contributed to the voting rights bill. The specifics of communications with Johnson, the Whitehouse, and George Wallace were new information. I might comment here that the previously mentioned physical casting success did not hold true for J. Edgar; Dylan Baker was not even close, but no cigar.
Again I agree with the reviews that this movie is timely. It comes at a time when the 20thcentury gains of liberal democracy are being rolled back, as if rewinding and enhancing to conditions perhaps worse than before the Sixties, and what was then generally thought of as Southern viciousness and intolerance has spread like an infection to the entire country. There is no need to go through the litany of Ferguson, Miami, Minneapolis, and Charlottesville or to name the face that has been put on the disease, but this new generation should indeed and with all due speed be made aware of what their parents paid for freedoms they did not even recognize they had. Freedoms that have been patiently and intractably hunted down and extinguished one politician at a time; rights that have been retracted from the Left and reformatted for newly “born” corporations on the Right; and we wait for someone, anyone, to stand and deliver us from the newtold lies of the most incredibly coopted corporate media the world has ever seen.
