Runtime: 2 hours, 8 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Ava DuVernay
Quick (or not so Quick) Impressions:
The American Civil Rights Movement has fascinated me ever since I first taught a course on the Rhetoric of Civil Disobedience as a graduate student at UT. I chose that topic because I’ve always had an interest in Greek philosophy and the American Transcendentalists, but while teaching the course, I quickly became fascinated by the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and other prominent figures dedicated to ensuring equal rights for African Americans (and in many cases, for all Americans).
I never learned anything about the Civil Rights Movement in school. Nothing. (Well, I mean, I’m sure in elementary school, we talked about Martin Luther King having a dream, and I remember learning about Barbara Jordan in fourth grade, but those were lessons designed for children.) My high school A.P. U.S. history class stopped after World War II. We did a Holocaust unit, watched some episodes of The Twilight Zone (to cover the Cold War), and then our teacher said, “If you’re taking the AP test, go ahead and finish reading the textbook so you find out what happened in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.”
This was a sensible approach, but (shh!) I didn’t finish reading the textbook. I was busy not understanding economics and not finding much time to study for Academic Decathlon. Instead, I just guessed on those questions. But I still got a 4 on the AP test, so I didn’t have to take US history in college. As a result, while I can easily give you a rundown about what happened in the reign of every single English monarch (I used to help a friend fall asleep that way) or chat for hours about Thucydides, or tell you all about how Rasputin (eventually) died, I have no clue what happened in the second half of the 20th century in our own country.
Everything I know about what happened in this country after 1945, I have learned on my own, from personal reading (often about Marilyn Monroe—that woman knew everybody! And they were all tapping her phone!) or pop culture. (And I suspect there are others like me.) I learned the most from teaching, both from planning the curriculum and from exchanging ideas with the students. (And I’m not just throwing out a teachery sound bite here. It is amazing how much I learned from my students. Teachers say that, and it sounds like a cliché, but it is so true. When you open yourself up to other people’s ideas and points of view, it is astonishing what you learn and how you grow!) (That sounds so cheesy, but I’m serious! I promise!)
And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized just how much racism infected my thinking when I was younger. At the time, I wasn’t even aware of it. That’s why when I hear people insist that our society is still incredibly racist, I know that they’re right. (I mean, it’s not like I’ve reached the height of self-awareness. I’m sure there’s plenty I still don’t realize, and that will never end.) My parents and I are very much not on the same page with this, and I get frustrated, but the fact is, it’s very difficult to recognize something that has pervaded your culture for so long that it has shaped your thoughts and personality since childhood. You don’t see it.
My parents are great people. They are genuinely kind and often extremely hospitable and they always make friends with all their neighbors (unlike shy me) and treat everyone they encounter extremely well (and often bake them cookies). They have friends of many different races and cultural backgrounds, but that doesn’t change the fact that in the abstract, they still think some very weird stuff sometimes, and when they express it, they literally cannot understand why I suggest that it might be objectionable or wrong-headed.
But I have become very conscious of race (which in itself seems troublingly racist to me. When I was a child, I never noticed race, and I wish I could return to such a pure state). I’ve made a self-conscious effort to examine my thoughts and weed out misguided impulses justified by once unnoticed prejudices. Not to sound self-aggrandizing, but I’m a pretty nice person. I like just about everybody, and I’m genuinely interested in new ideas and points of view other than my own. Though I have extreme (extreme!) flaws, I am by nature very accepting of people and fairly non-judgmental (except apparently of my parents). So when I find these traces of inherent prejudice buried in my own thinking, I have to assume it’s everywhere. When people claim that racism no longer exists in our society, I know that they’re flat out wrong.
The problem is, society has changed (for the better), so most people readily acknowledge that the KKK is bad, you shouldn’t lynch people, everyone deserves an education, we can all share the same public restroom (unless you’re transgendered, and then I guess you just have to hold it so the rest of us aren’t faced with a vexing dilemma).
When Eric Garner couldn’t breathe, most people (of all races) reacted by wondering in horror, “Oh my God, why didn’t he let that guy breathe? Why did that police officer murder that man?”
So no, most people aren’t going around committing hate crimes and thinking nothing of it. That kind of racism has been largely blotted out (though not so much that it doesn’t rear its ugly head on occasion and gobble up all the news ratings, like the measles).
An unfortunate side effect of this improvement, though is that many people who aren’t experiencing the negative effects of racism truly believe that there is no longer racism. They fail to consider how pervasively long-standing racist ideas have influenced public perceptions and shaped our culture. Just because it’s sometimes subtle doesn’t mean it isn’t there, but unfortunately, it’s human nature to believe only what we see.
I once had a discussion about Spike Lee’s film Inside Man. (I won’t reveal the identity of my interlocutor because I believe the anecdote casts the person in an unfairly unflattering light.)
“Spike Lee is the one who is racist,” s/he said.
“Well maybe. I mean, all his films are about racism,” I allowed, “but I think the idea is to force people to think about racism and perhaps to coax out and expose the racial prejudices in the audience.”
“I didn’t like the movie,” s/he said, “but it’s not because I’m racist. It’s because I didn’t like the role reversal of how the good guys were black and the bad guys were white.”
???
What do you say to that?
Anyway, I was able to see this film yesterday because my parents went to see American Sniper and the showtimes were only five minutes off, so they gave me a ride to the theater while my husband had our car at an in-office meeting.
On the ride home as we discussed the movies, my father remembered that his dad (a Christian minister) had always called him Martin Lucifer King and was overjoyed when he was shot. Then my mother shared that her grandma was also vocally pleased to hear of King’s death. (And she called him something much, much worse that I won’t repeat.) They explained that at the time, the people they knew had seen King as an agitator who was responsible for inciting violence (because nobody else in the whole world wanted voting rights for African Americans, just MLK. It was all his idea, obviously).
It’s staggering to me to think these events happened just twenty years before the summer I was five years old watching Gremlins and Ghostbusters and eating snowcones across the street from the Alamo. The world had changed so much in such a short time. But it can’t change that much, that fast. That’s the thing. When you begin at a point of such widespread ignorance and pervasive prejudice, all of that (unintentionally) muddled thinking isn’t simply eradicated from mainstream culture after a measly few decades. That’s not how culture works.
I was talking to someone recently who suggested that Selma was poorly received by white audiences because “we are sick of hearing about that. It’s all we ever hear about.” (Never mind that someone else talking with us had just asked me if Oprah Winfrey plays Selma in the movie.) I replied that I had never learned about these historical events in school and I had never seen a film about precisely this topic before.
But for a lot of people, the precise topic doesn’t matter. Twelve Years a Slave was about African American “issues” and so is Selma, so they are the same, case closed. This is definitely a racist way of thinking, but the people who think this way don’t think so. Even if you call them on it, they still (in my experience) usually don’t see your point. Maybe they’ll politely agree with you to get you to shut up after a while, but that won’t really get you anywhere.
I know Selma was rushed to theaters in a big hurry because of all the racial unrest in the country in recent months. The film was timely, topical, so they wanted to get it out there to audiences even though the screeners weren’t ready. As a result, the film found a huge, appreciative audience, but probably shot itself in the foot when it comes to winning awards.
For the past several weeks, I have heard extensive news coverage about Selma’s scandalous snub by the racist Academy, and that very quickly started to get on my nerves. For one thing, Selma was not snubbed. It was nominated for Best Picture. True it received fewer nominations than its fans expected, but that is not necessarily all the fault of the evil, racist Academy.
For one thing, the screeners went out so late that many voting members probably did not get a chance to watch the film. For another, the movie did not depict LBJ accurately and for dramatic effect made him look like less a supporter of Civil Rights than he was. That rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
Remember, it wasn’t only the Academy that was stingy to Selma, and I think the late or absent screeners and inaccurate depiction of LBJ are the biggest reasons the film missed in most places.
Also, as far as Ava DuVernay not getting a nomination for Best Director—sorry, that is not a legitimate complaint. She’s a relative newcomer. Do you know how long it took Steven Spielberg to win Best Director? Hitchcock never won! Stanley Donen was never even nominated. Not once. And remember how Ben Affleck missed for Argo! That just happened! Just because you make a movie, that does not mean you automatically get an Oscar nomination, even if it’s a good, important movie that a lot of people really like.
People keep expressing disappointment because DuVernay would have been the first African American female Best Director if she had won. Talk about counting your chickens before they’re hatched! Hilary Clinton would have been the first female president, too—if she had been elected! (Same thing applies to people like Liddy Dole, Geraldine Ferraro, Sarah Palin, my mom.) My grandma would have been the first woman in space—if she had gone to space!
This kind of complaining is just inane. Yes, the Academy is a bit racist. You know what else is racist—our entire society. Plus the Academy gives out awards to recognize artistic excellence in its industry, the movie industry. It is not The Academy of Fairness and Justice for All. We’re talking about the Oscar here, not the Nobel Peace Prize.
Should Selma have been nominated for Best Picture? Yes. And it was. Should David Oyelowo have been nominated for Best Actor. Probably. He gives an excellent performance (but, in fairness, so do the five guys who did get nominated). DuVernay would have been a solid choice for Best Director, but it is hardly an outrage that she wasn’t nominated. She has a long career ahead of her and will no doubt get plenty of chances in the future.
I get so annoyed with people who pretend to care about the Oscars only when a film that year somehow touches on an issue to which they are personally committed. Nobody is denying that Martin Luther King’s legacy is important (nobody who’s not an extremist lunatic, anyway), but that does not mean that a film about him must be nominated for a zillion Oscars. That’s not the way the Oscars work. They are the Academy Awards. If you hate the Academy so much, stop talking about their awards and give out your own awards. That’s more productive than complaining, isn’t it?
On the other hand, it is extremely disheartening to have actual conversations with people I know personally and hear them say that they’re sick of seeing “that kind of thing all the time,” i.e. films with a largely African American cast and theme.
Our society remains troublingly racist. Still I don’t see how berating the Academy solves anything. Somehow it’s become fashionable to spend a few minutes bashing the Academy and film industry, as if such rants are effective social activism. (Because Hollywood is so opposed to social progress and if anybody speaks up to validate minorities, it’s never actors giving Oscar acceptance speeches!) Scapegoating the Academy may make you feel very smart and impressive, but I’ve got news for you. Hollywood could fall into the ocean tomorrow, and racism would still be a huge problem all over the United States.
So there you go. It looks like I’m thoroughly irritated with everyone for the second week in a row. I’ve got to quit watching the news. If only my dad didn’t love watching the news so much!
The Good:
Now that I’ve got that out of my system, let me say that Selma is an enjoyable, eye opening, and emotionally stirring film that I enjoyed. Director Ava DuVernay clearly has a lot of talent and knows how to reach the audience on an emotional level.
The cast is uniformly excellent.
David Oyelowo makes a perfect Martin Luther King, and the film takes the rather novel approach of humanizing him, showing us his fears and doubts. (And it’s so odd to hear him called “Martin” instead of “Dr. King.”)
Carmen Ejogo is so good as his wife Coretta that her failure to get an Oscar nomination almost seems like a crime.
Several members of the supporting cast stand out. I kept noticing Colman Domingo, André Holland, Common (whose song feels like a deserved lock, by the way), Stephan James, Stephen Root, Wendell Pierce, and Giovanni Ribisi. (It’s actually a particularly great part for Giovanni Ribisi, an unusual role for him.)
Tim Roth is great as George Wallace. He’s always good at conveying that “I’m the evilest sleazebucket who was ever a sleazebucket” presence.
Ever since Michael Clayton, I have unabashedly loved Tom Wilkinson, and I think his scene at the end with Wallace is electrifying and goes a long way toward rectifying the “damage” done to LBJ’s legacy by the way the early scenes of the movie portray him. But overall, I wasn’t crazy with the way Johnson comes across in this movie (more on that later), and I also felt that Wilkinson physically reminded me much more of Richard Nixon which was just weird.
Oprah Winfrey is very good in a small role. The scene where she attempts to register to vote is so effective emotionally. It made me so angry and reminded me of every time I have ever been treated unfairly by anyone. Seriously, I wanted to scream at the screen, “Why do you have to be such a jerk?” (I had to move from Texas to the deep south for a brief period once, and I did not enjoy it, so perhaps I am a bit biased against people with authority in small towns because of my own personal experiences. I remember when one kid heard I’d come from Corpus Christi and said (trying to be friendly), “Down there with the spics, huh? Must be nice to live with normal people again.” In my mind, I punched him in the face and screamed, “I hate you, and I don’t want to live here!!!!! You’re an idiot! I hope you die! I would rather be dead than talking to you!!!!!” and ran away and burned down the school. But in real life, I couldn’t do much because I did live there. Lucky me. And see, he was being nice to me. Imagine if I hadn’t been white, and he’d been trying to antagonize me. How frustrating must it feel to be belittled by someone and not to be able to retaliate in any way!)
My favorite character in the whole movie, though, was definitely Cager Lee (Henry G. Sanders). How can anyone not love that guy? Such horrible things happen to him. He endures so much. And then his story has such a powerful ending. Plus Sanders has remarkable screen presence and presents the character so well.
Before seeing the film, I had heard that some people disliked it because it was racist and hostile to white people. This is perfectly ridiculous. While the portrayal of LBJ is a little iffy, the film certainly does not demonize him. And DuVernay actually makes a point of showing us many, many well-meaning allies of all races and creeds who come to Selma to lend their support. King was a Christian minister, after all, and a lot of what he said came directly from the Gospel. He appealed to the consciences of all people. He wanted to make a better world for everyone. And the movie reflects this same spirit of inclusion. In fact, at the end of the film, DuVernay goes out of her way to call attention to the fact that one of the white allies was murdered just after King’s final speech of the film for giving African Americans a ride in her car. If the director were against white people, such a detail could easily be left out of her film. (But cries of “reverse racism” are usually false, so I wasn’t really expecting to find that in the film, anyway.)
My favorite aspect of Selma (which I’ll discuss in greater detail later) was the notion that King’s goal was to expose the plight of African Americans in the South to the rest of the nation (and the world). In the film he says himself that he organizes these marches and protests to force what is normally done under cover of darkness out into the light where everyone can see it. I found that idea profoundly arresting. It also reminded me a great deal of American Sniper. (For some reason, the media thinks it’s a great idea to pit these two movies against each other, but in reality, they have so much in common that they’re practically in dialogue with one another and would make a great double feature.)
Also, before I forget, I should mention that the film has fabulous music. “Glory” is a great song, but it’s not the only great song in the movie. The entire soundtrack is fantastic.
Best Scene:
My favorite scene by far is the very early moment of the little girls descending the stairwell in the church.
Even before the dramatic ending–which certainly packs an emotional punch—the scene is so fantastic. The girls are so charming and such typical children that it’s easy to relate to them almost immediately.
I remember thinking, Wow! They really did a great job casting these kids and writing this dialogue. There’s an easy authenticity, a vibe of unassuming naturalism. You feel like you’ve eavesdropped on this conversation before. You know these girls. They go to your school. They live down the street. Maybe you’ve even been these girls.
Watching, I thought appreciatively, Well now I see why everyone is raving about Ava DuVernay! This is such a well-directed scene!
For some reason, I did not anticipate the ending. (I think that’s the idea. It’s supposed to be a jarring shock. But this is a historical film. Really, I should have known.)
For the next several minutes, all I could think was, Why would anybody do that? Why would anybody do that? Why would anybody do that?
Dear God, life is hard enough, you know? Why would people go out of their way to hurt other people? Why? (Unless you’re in a war zone and constantly being attacked, it is so easy not to murder people. You just don’t murder people. What is hard about that?)
This scene also made me think of how similar Selma is thematically to American Sniper. War in another country is invisible to most of us. Any violence that we don’t experience is invisible to us. When you read about these historical events, you don’t think about the little girls in the stairwell. But when you are forced to think about the little girls in the stairwell, then surely you’re forced to think twice about committing horrific acts of violence just to make your dissatisfaction known.
Best Action Sequence:
The attack that ends the first attempt to march across the bridge is pretty hard to forget.
Best Scene Visually:
Fittingly, we are shown several separate shots of people marching over the bridge toward the waiting police. One of the earliest of these I particularly like. We see the crowd from behind, flowing like a human river.
All of the different angles and perspectives are good, though. Since this is the most thematically significant act in the film, I think DuVernay makes an excellent choice in presenting it to us from such a variety of artfully chosen angles.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, David Oyelowo/Carmen Ejogo:
Both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress were highly competitive this year, but these two really should have been nominated.
Oyelowo definitely has King’s accent and inflection down. If I had to guess why he didn’t get the nomination, I’d assume it was a combination of these factors:
1) Oyelowo is not particularly well known in American film. His star has really only started to rise in the past couple of years even though he’s been working a long time (kind of like Rosamund Pike).
2) The role doesn’t let him show tremendous range. (Malcolm X is a character more likely to behave in Oscary fashion.)
3) The screeners went out late. (That is a big deal that people downplay too much.)
4) People disliked the movie’s treatment of L.B.J., so they snubbed the whole cast.
5) Racism (most likely the kind people don’t realize is racism. I doubt some Oscar voters didn’t like Selma because they hate MLK and are white supremacists. I’ll bet it’s more like they were thinking, Oh come on. We let the black movie win last year. Do we have to vote for the African American thing every year? Twelve Years a Slave and Selma are radically different projects, of course, and the impulse to equate them is definitely racist, but you’re never going to convince most people who react that way that that’s the case.)
At any rate, Oyelowo should probably have been nominated, but at whose expense? Best Actor should be expanded to include 5 -10 nominees like Picture. (Isn’t it sad that there are always like fifty million promising candidates for Best Actor, but they always have to dig up obscure little projects from the four corners of the earth just to scrounge up five women who have been given sufficiently meaty leading roles to make them realistic Oscar contenders?)
Oyelowo can console himself with the fact that Tom Hanks also failed to get a nomination for his brilliant work in Captain Phillips last year. Though clearly not racially motivated, that was by far the more egregious snub (though again, the five actors they did nominate all deserved the honor).
Carmen Ejogo, meanwhile, is the one who was truly snubbed from this film. They should have found room for her in Supporting Actress. She gives a killer performance as Coretta Scott King. Though she really has only a couple of big moments, I actually think she’s even better than Oyelowo (though obviously she doesn’t have to contend with the difficulty of playing MLK).
Their scene together in which they discuss the threatening phone calls, the future of their marriage, and his potential infidelities is masterfully played by both of them, but Ejogo particularly shines. It’s a crime that she hasn’t gotten more awards recognition for this role.
The Negatives:
I had three problems with this film, and two of them are related.
The remaining complaint is pretty minor (to say nothing of subjective), so I’ll get it out of the way first. I thought overall Selma was a bit too uneven to be called a masterpiece. It had flashes of inspired filmmaking, pure excellence. If everything in the movie had been like that bit on the stairwell then I would go right now, steal the Oscar, and deliver it personally to Ava DuVernay with a big bow on top and a complimentary basket of Valentine chocolates. But not every moment in the film is of equal excellence.
Granted, start-to-finish excellence is probably too much to expect from any film. But at moments, Selma seems almost boring (and this is coming from someone extremely interested in a) the movie’s subject matter and b) the Oscar race).
Imagine if you weren’t particularly interested in King’s work or Civil Rights or history and you were trying to watch this film because it’s an Oscar nominee. Maybe people didn’t vote for it because it failed to hold their interest. Some moments (usually the moments of senseless, depraved, cruel violence) are incredibly exciting and horrifically engaging. But there are also innumerable scenes of King just sitting there slowly speaking to someone. Selma contains a lot of slow, measured, thoughtful conversations. (Lincoln was like that, too.)
I’m not saying this is necessarily a flaw in the film. Not everything has to be a suspenseful, violent, high-octane sex-fest, but you’ll notice that American Sniper is raking in a lot more cash, and it’s about some guy who shoots people for two hours straight. A film that sometimes slows down for long conversations in dulcet tones is going to lose some people, no matter how historically significant said conversations are. So maybe that’s a flaw in the audience, not in the film, but it still makes the movie less effective than it might be otherwise.
The far greater issue is the thing everybody in the media has been complaining about for over a month. Lyndon Johnson was a real person, just as real as Martin Luther King, so his legacy should count for something, too. It’s commendable that DuVernay wants to honor King’s work and simultaneously humanize him, showing the audience that he was a real, three-dimensional person who struggled within himself to find the courage to do great things. But Johnson isn’t just some expendable piece of trash. I can see why people complain about DuVernay throwing LBJ under the bus, especially because his legacy is (arguably) tarnished just for the sake of creating some convenient dramatic tension and an orderly story structure.
Yes, films are allowed to take artistic license. In fact, nothing you see in a movie is ever reliable. Movies change novels to the point that they’re no longer even recognizable. (Seriously, sometimes they just steal the title.) And if you try to learn history just by watching movies, you’re going to make a complete fool of yourself at a cocktail party one day, I assure you. And then you will be very, very sorry that you trusted movies instead of reading up on the subject yourself.
My very favorite thing about this movie is an idea that King expresses when trying to explain his methods to the students suspicious of his intervention. He says that the purpose of the marches is to force people to act in light of day on a world stage in the way they have been acting in darkness and in secret for years. In other words, if police choose to brutalize a group of African Americans under cover of darkness, they will probably get away with it. Nobody but the people being brutalized ever sees the horror of the violence, so others do not fully believe it or in some cases even realize that it’s happening at all.
This sentiment reminded me immediately of American Sniper (a great film to pair with Selma, despite the war the media seems to want to start between the films). Most civilians don’t see the war, so they don’t realize what the vets have gone through. The problem is invisible to them.
In the 1960s (and before) most white Americans did not see the horrific violence enacted on African Americans (by overzealous law enforcement and unchecked vigilante groups). It’s one thing to hear somebody got what was coming to him. It’s another to witness firsthand someone beating an unarmed man until his face becomes disfigured and he dies. When you see the violence yourself, you have a very different impression of what has happened. At the very least, you are forced to acknowledge that something is happening.
Ignorance and misinformation bred fear in my parents’ parents and grandparents. Clearly they had no knowledge of what the Civil Rights Movement was like from an African American point of view. They thought King was inciting violence. They did not realize that he was merely forcing into the open violence that had been enacted on the African American community for years. Most white Americans did not see that violence. It was hidden from them, invisible (in much the same way that the average German family under Hitler had no knowledge of the death camps).
So in this film, Ava DuVernay is doing something crucial to creating more widespread understanding of the Civil Rights Movement and just what Martin Luther King was trying to accomplish. She wants to show us what King wanted to show everyone. King believed that if people around the world actually witnessed the inhumane injustices practiced upon the African American community (particularly in the South), they would react in horror and be driven by conscience to come to the aid of their persecuted brothers and sisters.
And he was right. When people saw for themselves what was truly happening, they were appalled, and most did not want to be complicit in such atrocious acts. When King called for clergy and other people of conscience to come to Selma and march with him, a whole bunch of people showed up to answer his call. By now, most of us have seen photographs and film or read vivid descriptions of the kinds of atrocious things that actually happened to African Americans in this country. So regardless of what our ancestors thought, we, having far more information, are on the side of Martin Luther King.
Selma actually shows us what was happening at that time—from the African American point of view—more effectively than any other film on the subject I have ever seen.
The problem is, there are probably still people alive today (particularly people who were also alive in 1964) who have not seen this story presented from this point of view before. So DuVernay’s film could be hugely eye opening for them. She’s presenting well known events from a point of view they may never have seen or considered before.
But most white people who lived through that era are quite familiar with the presidency and character of Lyndon Johnson. Even I know a bit about Johnson because when I was a kid every time people visited us from out of town, for some reason we took them to the Johnson ranch. Johnson’s favorite song was “Rain Drops Keep Falling on My Head,” and I came to look forward to hearing it very much, too, because that meant the interminable, unbearable bus tour was almost over. (Learning about his life was interesting, but in those days that tram was not air-conditioned, and we always went in like, July.) Taking the tour at the Johnson ranch will leave you with quite a favorable impression of LBJ. (And when I was a kid, sometimes you’d see Lady Bird sitting on her porch as you drove past, and she’d wave.) In fact, I remember my dad remarking that after learning so much about Johnson’s life and his dedication to Civil Rights, education, and eradicating poverty, he had a much more favorable impression of him. (His dad also had it in for LBJ, you see. I don’t think he called him Lyndon Beelzebub Johnson or anything, but he thought he murdered Kennedy—though why that would upset him I don’t know because he was also really against Catholicism. My grandpa was a great guy in many ways, but when you were around him, it was wisest to forget that you had any opinions on any subject.)
My point is, you cannot present Johnson in a false way and then expect people to believe that the rest of your movie is true. You’re undermining your own efforts and making it entirely too easy for actual, malevolent racists to dismiss everything that you’re saying. Why should anyone believe something they’ve never seen or considered before when you’re presenting information they are familiar with in a way they recognize as false? DuVernay’s portrayal of LBJ makes the whole movie seem unreliable, and that’s a fatal flaw when what you’re trying to do is get audiences to trust your vision enough to consider old events in a new light. You can’t open people’s eyes to anything if you give them reason not to trust you.
This is a serious and truly unfortunate flaw with the film because it undermines its own central objective.
People who know a lot about Johnson and regard him highly are likely to be seriously turned off by his portrayal here. And once they’ve turned against the director, they’re going to be incredibly critical of everything else in the film.
This is doubly unfortunate because the film relies so heavily on its ability to move the audience emotionally, to appeal to us through pathos, to reach out to us on a human level. If people think you’re a liar who will bend the truth to suit her agenda, then they’re going to regard such emotionally driven scenes as an effort to confuse and manipulate the audience, creating massive resentment. This is actually the third problem. The film is so emotionally charged that it runs the risk of coming across as propaganda designed to hoodwink the ill-informed. (Mind you, I don’t think that’s what Selma is doing, but I’m telling you, people who are upset about the treatment of LBJ—even if they know nothing about him and are just going by what the news has told them—are going to approach the film with scrutiny and suspicion.)
Overall:
To me, Selma feels like fantastic early work by a director who is going to go on to make even greater films in the future. I would have no problem with a Best Director nomination for Ava DuVernay. This film has many moments of genuine excellence, flashes of brilliance, and overall it’s quite an impressive effort to accomplish something meaningful. But I also don’t consider her snub a terrible injustice. Best Director is competitive, the film does have its flaws, and she’ll have more chances in the future, I’m sure (especially now that there’s been so much media controversy that she’s practically a household name).
I can’t imagine anybody playing King better than David Oyelowo. It’s a shame he didn’t get a nomination. And it’s an outright crime Carmen Ejogo didn’t get a nod for Best Supporting Actress. I think she does some of the finest acting in the film.
I’m fairly certain that despite its few nominations, though, Selma will definitely win Best Song. (If it doesn’t, that will be a huge injustice because “Glory” truly is the best song this year. In fact, it was practically the only good song nominated by the Golden Globes. I must admit, however, that the Glen Campbell song is a real tearjerker that made me bawl like a baby, so if that somehow wins, I wouldn’t be too upset. But really, “Glory” deserves to win the Oscar for Best Song, and I think it probably has that one in the bag.)