Selma (2014)

It's not easy to review a film with a focus on a civil rights hero. Viewers' passions are bound to run high, and some might take even a slight criticism as a sign of racism. Others might roll their eyes at me for going too easy on it, thinking I'm racist in its favor. Well, all I can offer is my earnest impression.

The story begins with MLK (David Oyelowo) preparing to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Before long come two indicators that he still has a lot of work to do: a church bombing and a ludicrous suffrage obstacle. Since talking to the president will accomplish only so much, he organizes a protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The march itself doesn't get a lot of screen time; there's more than enough drama in just preparing for it, what with threats of arrest and physical violence from multiple parties. It doesn't help that the FBI is typewriting the activist leaders' every move, as shown right on the screen.

Assuming the tale's decent accuracy (IMDb turns up mostly unimportant anachronisms; others levy harsher but limited accusations), I can say I've learned a few things, and they're not pretty. For example, only registered voters could serve on juries in some systems, so the nearly complete absence of black voting in the South meant, aside from the obvious, little chance of fair trials for black defendants or plaintiffs. This chapter of history doesn't carry quite the consistent shock value for me as the Holocaust, but it still delivers now and then.

I can't help seeing the movie as having an agenda; it's no surprise that Spike Lee had expressed an interest in directing before. MLK appears almost flawless, with only a brief hint of marital infidelity (shaming the enemies who dug it up) offering to bring him down from a saintly level. He doesn't readily trust Malcolm X, understandably, yet we see only the likable reformed X. Even the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which some viewers complain is given short shrift, hardly loses our respect.

On the other side of the coin, their opponents, from Sheriff Jim Clarke to J. Edgar Hoover (oddly cast Dylan Baker) to the later penitent George Wallace (Tim Roth), seem to have no particular reason for espousing their attitudes. Granted, I doubt they had good reasons in reality (and I'll never fathom what possesses a man to bomb a church to assert racial supremacy); but as it stands, they hardly seem like real people. Nearly all the white Southerners, in fact, come across as this unified block of nastiness. Only when some white people, mostly pastors, join the march do we really see comparable non-black good guys.

It would be pretty hypocritical of me to put down this agenda after my rather positive review of American Sniper. I just wish we got to see a little more character complexity. Truly, I get the feeling of everyone being held at arm's length, letting us merely skim the surface. Only Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), who has to juggle many competing priorities, really strikes me as at least two-dimensional.

My inclination is to blame the film's faults on the relatively inexperienced director, Ava DuVernay. Oh, there's some fine cinematography, but she seems to have trouble keeping a consistent pace. One scene may feature an uncomfortably long pause; another may make an offhand mention of an already past momentous event that gets me to think, "What? We skipped that?" The moment that sealed DuVernay's greenness in my book was when MLK is told to turn on the TV (no specific channel) and the first thing we hear is "We interrupt this program...." That kind of timing defies belief.

In the end, I didn't need to see Selma, but neither do I feel like I wasted my time. Every so often, the largely predictable script would throw me a curveball. It got me feeling, which I say matters more than anything else in cinema.