Selma builds its way toward a celebration of the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Sharply focused on the key months leading up to a series of three nonviolent protest marches in Selma, Alabama, it agonizingly captures the textures of human toil and determination that led to the momentous legislation. Director Ava DuVernay zeros in on Martin Luther King’s ability to channel enormous power, yet exercise exceptional self-containment and control. The film is at its strongest when it portrays the intimate, inward side of King and his entourage of key advisors and assistants. Anything but an icon, the King depicted here is very much a walking and talking human being. His worries and sorrows are portrayed side by side with his contagious confidence. We see King at a low ebb–calling Mahalia Jackson in the middle of the night and asking her to sing to him. We see King whispering his despair to Ralph Abernathy as they sit in a darkened jail cell, the latter providing succor to his friend by quoting the Bible.
King must go head to head with a vacillating Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson). Although Johnson’s opposition might possibly be exaggerated by DuVernay and screenwriter Paul Webb, they nonetheless give a sharp picture of the political need for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to strategize as much as to call for action. In fact, in one of the film’s most stirring scenes, it is King’s decision for inaction in support of a safer outcome that resonates. In a second march to the bridge, this time with clergy and activists from all over the country, King halts the march, sensing that the police are poised for another brutal attack that caused the first march to be called “Bloody Sunday.” With 2,500 marchers behind him, he kneels down in prayer to get direction and then returns the marchers around to return to the church. Later, when met with fierce criticism, King says, “I’d rather have people hate me than have them get unnecessarily hurt.” David Oyelowo is great at conveying King’s ability to refrain from impulsive decisions. As King goes, so goes his strong supporting group.
Selma also does a very fine job with its set pieces. The group’s first march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965 and the brutal response against the 600 unarmed black marchers from state troopers and Selma police, was a game changer in terms of spurring the American public’s outrage. DuVernay depicts a scene fraught with the terror of an attacking police on horseback with clubs and whips and tear gas. Yet DuVernay wisely pulls back, eventually cloaking the brutality with a white cloud of tear gas. She practices a similar restraint in a scene that devastatingly depicts the slaying a year earlier of four little girls at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. The previously unheralded DuVernay picked up the reins to this film at the behest of Oyelowo, who starred in her 2012 feature Middle of Nowhere. Had the film been left up to Lee Daniels, her predecessor as the announced director, we likely would have been given a product much closer to his The Butler, which paraded before us a series of cartoonish presidents. While DuVernay (who did a rewrite of Webb’s screenplay) flirts with one-dimensionality in her depiction of Lyndon Johnson and racist Alabama governor George Wallace, two veritable acting pros save the day. Wilkinson is paired with Tim Roth as Wallace, and their performances outweigh any rumblings of melodrama. Also strong in the stellar cast is Carmen Ejogo as King’s wife Coretta, Andre Holland as Andrew Young, Colman Domingo as Ralph Abernathy, Common as James Bevel, and Stefan James as John Lewis, who at age 74 is currently in his 28th year as a Congressman from Georgia.
Ever the brilliant strategist, King is fully aware that previous voter registration drives in Georgia failed to move the public’s consciousness because the police reaction there had been as equally nonviolent as that of the protesters. His wish to move the needle on the response of the American public was due to a wisely prescient determination that Selma’s bad guys would not counter as tamely. Throughout he cites a “we can’t wait any longer” urgency to end egregious voter registration practices. Among them were ludicrous civics tests (brought to life in the film by a victimized Oprah Winfrey), poll taxes, the need for “vouchers” by an existing voter (when no other black for miles was actually registered), and the publication of a successful registrant’s name and address in the local paper in case anyone cared to direct any violence their way.
Remarkably, this is the first dramatic film to deal with Martin Luther King as a main character (the 14-hour documentary television series Eyes on the Prize is essential viewing on the subject). Selma’s timeliness pertains not only to the imminent 50th anniversary of the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson (heartbreakingly depicted here), but to our current news headlines as well. A mere year-and-a-half after The Supreme Court overturned many of the provisions contained in The Voters Rights Act, the freedom of minorities to vote is sadly again in jeopardy. Side by side with a politicization of the voting booth is the reoccurrence of racial unrest in the face of unarmed citizens again finding themselves at risk. While Selma celebrates one of the most important victories in our history, it serves as a bittersweet reminder that King’s fight serves as a beacon of exemplary behavior in the light of an ongoing struggle.